Creating a seamless, visually consistent website experience requires attention to every detail — including form elements like drop-down menus. For years, the native HTML <select> element has posed a tough challenge for developers and designers. Its styling limitations often resulted in dropdowns that felt out of place with modern branding, compromising both aesthetics and user experience.
The Challenge: Styling the Hard-to-Style <select> Element
The <select> element is notorious as one of the most difficult native HTML components to customize. Traditional solutions often involve replacing it with JavaScript-based dropdowns, but these come with trade-offs. Such replacements frequently break accessibility features, conflict with existing scripts, and introduce maintenance headaches down the line. These drawbacks leave many teams stuck with dropdowns that don't quite fit their site's polished look — a persistent pain point in web design.
The Smarter Solution: Leveraging appearance: base-select
To address this challenge without sacrificing usability or accessibility, Visus implemented a modern approach using Chrome's new CSS property: appearance: base-select. This property allows the native <select> element to be fully styled while retaining its built-in behaviors and accessibility features.
By applying appearance: base-select, the dropdowns were transformed to align perfectly with the client's branding. This method avoided the fragile, script-heavy replacements that often complicate projects. The dropdowns now offer a consistent, on-brand look across all browsers and devices — desktop and mobile alike.
Results That Speak for Themselves
The client's drop-down menus now deliver a polished, professional appearance without sacrificing native functionality. This approach maintains superior performance, ensures ongoing accessibility compliance, and significantly reduces technical debt. It provides a future-proof solution that's easier to maintain, keeping the user experience consistent and elegant.
Key Takeaway: Embrace Modern Web Standards
This experience highlights a crucial insight for web teams: staying current with evolving web standards unlocks smarter, simpler solutions to persistent problems. Rather than investing in costly and complex workarounds, leveraging new CSS capabilities like appearance: base-select can deliver better user experiences with less effort and risk. Embracing these advancements allows teams to create sites that are not only beautiful but robust, accessible, and ready for the future.