Grant #88324 to UI Fund

In the initial research that helped establish OpenUI, input type="range" was #6 in the most frustrating controls (cited from 2019 CDS talk). Many of the frustrations are around styling. Browsers are not consistent in the parts they offer for styling, nor their names (where they do align) and relationships of those parts. They are all vendor prefixed and have changed over time. This makes many things difficult and some things even impossible.

Most design systems include at least one answer to range controlling - most often called 'slider', however there are other variants as well in the same vein. This is common enough that OpenUI already has very basic initial research for a component called Slider and a matrix of part support across them. In large part due to the above issues, many, if not most of these components attempt to entirely replace the native input type="range" and replace it with something better.

The CSS working group has had some discussions on some simple agreements around standardizing parts, and additionally agreed that OpenUI would be an ideal place to figure some of this out.

If provided the requested grant, it will fund my own work toward championing work towards advancing this area in OpenUI. Over the next months I would use it to find time towards (with help from people I know who are involved in this effort) helping inform and land considerable additional research and thought, an explainer and well-informed proposals for addressing these issues in OpenUI. While it is slightly difficult to suggest where things will land, I have considerable background in these things and writing about them and am pleased with suggestions toward following a model and path similar to <selectmenu>. It would allow me to spend time helping create and reply to GitHub issues or participate in some discussions, as well as to test and critique polyfills or experimental implementations if they arise in order to help improve them.