As designers, we are used to having quite a bit of control over how things are displayed in a browser. Sure, differing rendering engines don’t always agree on everything, but for the most part we can at least find ways to mitigate variance through workarounds, or by writing for the lowest common denominator.
By far, one of the most frustrating parts of dealing with browser inconsistencies has got to be forms. There are two distinctively differing schools of thought regarding (not) styling form elements. For the longest time, we’ve had people on both sides of the proverbial fence, neither group being particularly pragmatic.
Some designers advocate styling form elements to match the brand of a site. Others would tell you to leave them alone entirely, so that they adhere to the native look and feel of a given operating system.
That’s all well and good, except most browsers don’t mesh completely when it comes to OS consistency. Some browsers use a monospace font for textarea, and OS X neglects to style the border of textarea the same as text input elements. So what’s a designer to do? It’s a conundrum, for sure.
I would say that I fall somewhere in the middle of the two camps.