Don’t you just love how different browsers style (or rather, don’t style) select and option elements? One of the things I dread most as a developer is when the design team come in and produce forms with controls that are totally bespoke and unobtainable due to the browser limitations.

This prompted me to write a mootools class that replaces the existing select items on the page with custom style-able controls through CSS as a progressive enhancement. Here is an example of what the resulting dropdowns can look like:

The idea of skinnable dropdowns is nothing new but not many solutions are done in a way that mimics the select element’s behaviour and events correctly. Here is what mooSelecta does feature:

• support for any type of skins, all through CSS
• support for native element events (will work with scripting)
• support for keyboard look-ups when dropdown is open
• support for input labels
• support for tabindex

Have a look on the mooSelecta example page or on the mootools forge page for the plug-in itself (download etc).

One thing you need to be aware of is that if you want to dynamically change the selected value of a skinned select, you need to fire it’s onChange event for mooSelecta to update. For example, if you have a dropdown with id=”country” and class=”selecta”:

new mooSelecta({
    selector: "selecta"
});

// change default selected value via js later:
$("country").set("value", "United Kingdom").fireEvent("change");
// the event will make mooSelecta update

Aside from that, it’s fine, tested and working in IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3.6, Safari 4, Chrominum 5. Known issues with Opera keyboard events not being raised as expected. Enjoy!