[Millennium]

Just wanted to see what the general opinion on this one is. It has to do with form controls.

As we all doubtless already know, Mozilla and Netscape6 define their own set of form controls, which by default look wather Windowsy. However, they do have an important advantage: CSS works on them, with all the standard properties and such. This lets the designer create form controls which better blend in with the page. It also lets the user override those defaults to something they prefer.

Other browsers will, of course, show the form controls as they usually do (looking native, or in IE5/Mac's case, mostly-native), because CSS-capable browsers (at least theoretically) ignore what they can't process.

My question: do you think this is worth it? Is it better to have form controls always look native, or to let the designer blend them into the page?

[funkboy]

I just read the beginning (didn't get a chance to finish it yet, hope I do tonight) of a good article in the latest I.D. Magazine about the overabundance of icons in the world now. One of the points towards the beginning was the fact that icons that are supposed to convey the same meaning can't do that when every company/thing wants to put some sort of personal, stylized device on the icon.

Imagine if each "Stop" sign could have a different shade of red, a different shape, and/or a different font - we'd probably see an increase in accidents (or more people slowing down and saying, "What happened to the stop sign?!") .

I think OS-centric controls are better for pretty much all uses - if you're making some sort of really artsy-fartsy site, then I can see where you'd probably want to change radio buttons (which you could fake with either javascript or Flash) - but for most users having the same things from site to site are the best things. Take custom link colors - they can be good, but keeping them as some sort of blue color are what sites like Amazon.com and Ebay still use - if it works for them, it'll work for the majority of the web.

OS-centric baby!