I do not really understand what is the problem with flexible <select> implementation in browser.

In my Sciter[1] the following are supported ( see screenshot [2] ):

    <select type="dropdown"> - select with popup
    <select type="list"> - select list 
    <select type="tree"> - hierarchical select (a.k.a. tree view) 

and all of them may have

    <select multiple> - multi-select, value = array[]
    <select multiple="checkmarks"> - multi-select, value = array[]

select type="tree" may have also

    <select type="tree" treelines> - draw treelines 

<select> and <option>'s may have arbitrary markup inside (<hr>,<img>, whatever), even more any DOM element may have role="option" defined making it a selectable option :

    <li role="option">...</li>
    <option value="Sc"><code>Sc</code>Scandium</option>

And as a bonus, by declaring different flows in CSS in list you may have:

    select { flow:horizontal; } // horizontal select
    select { flow:vertical-wrap; } // multicolumn select

[1] https://sciter.com [2] https://sciter.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/select-variant...

Wish browsers would start shipping a sensible multi-select. There’s one now but it’s not user-friendly enough IMO.

TFA mentions `optgroup` too, wouldn't it make more sense to use that and style it similarly? Especially if `hr`-in-`select` is only going to work in Safari anyway(?).

Sadly, this is all academic because in all commercial work, “designers” demand that you reimplement SELECTs to make them look a very, very specific way “consistently across every OS, for our branding’s sake,” leading to devs implementing them as a soup of 42 nested DIVs, an SVG or two, and 12 event handlers, and they still don’t act right when the dropdown doesn’t have enough space below it in the viewport.

i had no idea <select multiple> existed. it works great on my ipad and has great browser support.

https://caniuse.com/mdn-html_elements_select_multiple

What's the reasoning for allowing select to have hr children but not optgroup? It doesn't seem like it would be any more problematic but I imagine I'm missing some relevant issue.

> You could still see it by manipulating the DOM or using XML, but apart from a couple of experts nobody knew.

Except for all the users who were frustrated by the change. Most users wouldn’t even know who to report this to, even if they noticed it at all. They may chalk up the issue to the new computer or phone they purchased in the last two decades.

For me the problem is that iOS already adds horizontal rules between all select options, so the new feature doesn't make any sense there, and I can't share code between Mac and iOS.

I wonder if anyone on the WebKit team looked at the blog post example in Mobile Safari?