HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
The conclusion Roger reaches may be disheartening, but it's accurate: “Very little styling
is applied the same way in every browser,” he says, “Trying to style form controls to look the
same across platforms is often a waste of time.”
In short, the best practice is probably to leave most form controls alone, or to style them
only lightly, using basic properties such as those for font color, size, and style, borders, and
background colors—and to do so with the expectation that these styles will often go unseen by
your visitors.
Laying Out Forms
As we've said, the default styling of form elements is notoriously inconsistent between
browsers. Sadly, this applies not only to the individual field widgets, but to the overall style of
the whole form. To demonstrate how this affects web designers looking to create usable and
attractive forms on the Web, let's first look at the same basic form in both Safari and Firefox
on Mac OS X (see Figures 11-1 and 11-2).
Figure 11-1.
Basic unstyled form as seen in Safari