Topic: Changing the border of select elements / drop down menus

I tried to change the color of a one-lined select box's border by using the following code:

<select size="1" name="dropdown" style="border: 1px solid #000000;">
<option value="">option 1</option>
<option value="">option 2</option>
<option value="">option 3</option>
</select>

but IE 6 / WinXP doesn't seem to want to change the default light blue color...

Any suggestions on how to achieve the desired effect?

kuckus

You *can't* change visual appearance of dropdown combobox, only border that you can change is the border of pull down menu that appears when you click on dropdown arrow...

Oh. I almost feared that. Thanks for the info though!

I think I'll disable Windows XP's new look for all form elements with <META HTTP-EQUIV="MSThemeCompatible" CONTENT="no">.
Or is there a way of disabling it for a single element only?

In the days of DOM and CSS you'd think that we could get a browser that enabled the styling of ALL elements.

A further question: do any of the browsers support multi-level select elements (i.e. using the OPTGROUP element)?

hlaford: I read somewhere that only Netscape 6 / Mozilla supports OPTGROUP, and that it doesn't look very pretty. But I never tested it.

As far as form elements are concerned, you must not forget that they are not the same on all operating systems (Linux had skinable window managers for a long time, and now Windows also supports skinning) and manipulating with them (changing them dynamically) would be a real pain, so that's the main reason why you have limited set of customizable things...

OPTGROUP HTML element is supported by IE6 for Windows, IE5 for Macintosh and Mozilla (starting from version that was used in NN6 beta 1).