Webkit’s New Color Picker as an Example of Good Platform Defaults

I’ve written about how I don’t love the idea of overriding basic computing controls. Instead, I generally favor opting to respect user choice and provide the controls their platform does.

Of course, this means platforms need to surface better primitives rather than supplying basic ones with an ability to opt out.

What am I even talking about? Let me give an example.

The Webkit team just shipped a new API for <input type=color> which provides users the ability to pick colors with wide gamut P3 and alpha transparency. The entire API is just a little bit of declarative HTML:

<label>
  Select a color:
  <input type="color" colorspace="display-p3" alpha>
</label>

From that simple markup (on iOS) you get this beautiful, robust color picker.

That’s a great color picker, and if you’re choosing colors a lot on iOS respectively and encountering this particular UI a lot, that’s even better — like, “Oh hey, I know how to use this thing!”

With a picker like that, how many folks really want additional APIs to override that interface and style it themselves?

This is the kind of better platform defaults I’m talking about. A little bit of HTML markup, and boom, a great interface to a common computing task that’s tailored to my device and uniform in appearance and functionality across the websites and applications I use. What more could I want? You might want more, like shoving your brand down my throat, but I really don’t need to see BigFinanceCorp Green™️ as a themed element in my color or date picker.

If I could give HTML an aspirational slogan, it would be something along the lines of Mastercard’s old one: There are a few use cases platform defaults can’t solve, for everything else there’s HTML.