Listbox keyboard interaction model — a way to get the old behavior? #1484

appearance: base-select currently changes the keyboard interaction model completely:

Testcase: https://codepen.io/leaverou/pen/ogBPMye

It appears this came out of the changes proposed in #113 and is by design.

I think this is generally a better default, though it does worry me that having so different behavior between a styled and an unstyled listbox could be confusing for sighted keyboard users.

But there is no way to get the old behavior back! While this is a better default, the old behavior did have some things going for it for certain use cases:

• It is now not possible to create a non-nullable listbox (without scripting). There are cases where an empty value is truly not meaningful.
• This requires an extra keystroke per selection

I wonder if it would make sense to introduce a CSS property or HTML attribute to control this. As a bonus, this could allow folks to adopt the new behavior on auto select too!

Related:

• [listbox] Usability downgrades with new customisable listbox #1351
• Keyboard behaviour of custom select options #1465