CSS ::file-selector-button

By  on  

We all love beautifully styled form controls but, due to the differences between operating system displays, styling them can be painful. Due to that pain, we've created scores of libraries to mock these controls. Unfortunately that sometimes comes at the cost of accessibility, performance, etc.

One control that has traditionally been tough to style is the input[type=file] element. Said input variation visually contains a button and text, all being clickable. Bit of a Frankenstein's monster if you ask me. Can we style the button part though? We can!

To style the button button portion of input[type=file], you can use ::file-selector-button:

input[type=file]::file-selector-button {
  border: 1px solid green;
  background: lightgreen;
}

Styling this input variant wasn't possible when it was first introduced. WebKit first started allowing styling complex form controls, and we can't thank them enough!

Recent Features

  • By
    fetch API

    One of the worst kept secrets about AJAX on the web is that the underlying API for it, XMLHttpRequest, wasn't really made for what we've been using it for.  We've done well to create elegant APIs around XHR but we know we can do better.  Our effort to...

  • By
    Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools

    MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does.  Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up.  I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own.  In any event...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Flashy FAQs Using MooTools Sliders

    I often qualify a great website by one that pay attention to detail and makes all of the "little things" seem as though much time was spent on them. Let's face it -- FAQs are as boring as they come. That is, until you...

  • By
    Using Opacity to Show Focus with jQuery

    A few days back I debuted a sweet article that made use of MooTools JavaScript and opacity to show focus on a specified element. Here's how to accomplish that feat using jQuery. The jQuery JavaScript There you have it. Opacity is a very simple but effective...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!