Why is the asp.net dropdown list button color tied to the windows color?

Question

The ASP.NET dropdownlist control has an arrow that you can click to drop the list down, that color of the arrow is tied to the users windows color scheme. This is not convenient for me and I'll need a workaround. However, I'm wondering if anyone knows (or has a guess) the strategy behind making that dropdown arrow tie to the system color?

Answer 1

Behind the scenes, the Winforms controls use the Win32 controls that have been in existence since Windows 3.0 (or was 3.0 still 16 bit? I don't recall). There is a lot of legacy under the covers, and back in the days it seemed to make sense to do it that way. I actually think it still make sense today to enforce some level of consistency between the user interfaces of all the applications of a platform.

Answer 2

Really, the style of your dropdownList depends on your navigator. Some navigators offer more support for this than others. The same ocurrs with checkboxes, for example.

Answer 3

Browsers are responsible for turning form input tags into user-interface controls. Internet Explorer and other browsers do this by using the operating system's user-interface controls. "A web page wants a <select>? We've got that control already!"

The problem you're probably experiencing, however, is that Internet Explorer has notoriously poor support for styling those controls - and especially the <select> control. Other modern browsers like FireFox and Chrome provide better support.

At this time, the only options for IE are (a) to abandon the <select> element in favor of some sort of javascript-based component or (b) to wait for IE8 and hope it has better style support. Since it is very, very difficult to find a javascript <select> implementation which provides robust keyboard support, many people choose to just live with ugly <select> boxes in IE for now - sacrificing style for usability and accessibility.

Answer 4

It has nothing to do with ASP.NET; you could view the same site on a Mac and it would look different. This is how windows displays that type of element. If you don't like it, then you will have to create your own. It's been done already.

Answer 5

Browsers, to a varying degree, pick up the users colour settings from the os, like any other application, so in the absense of any author specified settings, they are usually the default.

Be aware that once you start tweaking the styling for selects and other form elements, you need to be sure of giving a quite complete set of style rules, otherwise it can all go to hell in a handcart very quickly, just how quickly depends on the browser.