> The point being that the file input button doesn’t look like any other button on their website. But hey, why solve a problem when you can force the entire world to accommodate it?

Why don't the buttons on your website look like HIG-compliant buttons on whatever platform the user is using? That's what web chrome looked like back in the aughts and it was fantastic. Apparently you can still do it: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Forms/Th....

Question, is the point of HIG-compliance to make everything look exactly the same on a platform? Or is it to nail down some abstract sense of what makes UI intuitive to use?

It seems like people with this viewpoint pay lip service to the latter goal, which allows for trends like Material Design so long as they fit with the guidelines, while really wanting the former, which to me looks like nothing more than tilting at windmills.

I'd post screenshots of our current CMS work, where we have a design staff working earnestly to make everything super-intuitive, but HN doesn't do image management so this discussion will be sadly deprived of examples.

The point of the HIG is to make everything look and work the same on the platform: https://blog.prototypr.io/rediscovering-apples-human-interfa...

> “The purpose of visual consistency is to construct a believable environment for users… The transfer of skills is one of the most important benefits of a consistent interface, especially for beginning users.” pg. 10

> “…consistency makes it easier for a user to learn new applications; it also makes it less likely that a user who follows habits learned from one application will make a disastrous mistake when using a different one.” pg. xi

The HIG goes beyond simply expressing principles of what makes for a good UI. The consistency in and of itself allows users to develop an intuition and muscle memory for how their computer will work. That intuition is destroyed when different apps look and behave differently. In that sense, it's better to be less intuitive according to some abstract principle if necessary to achieve consistency. It will take the user longer to understand a "more intuitive" UI starting from first principles than to understand a UI that exhibits the quirks embedded in the HIG they already know.

Yeah that looks like it's always going to be fighting an uphill battle when it comes to the web. Native apps, certainly. But without an order of magnitude more professionalization of the workforce such that they can fight against business and popular trends, we're stuck with what we have.

This will never work because each browser has its own idea of how native controls should be rendered, even within the same platform. The link you posted even has examples of this. I'm all for the idea of using OS-native controls where possible, and for native apps you should absolutely do this, but I just don't think it's feasible on the web; I believe making your controls consistent across browsers is a better goal in most cases, as long as you don't sacrifice accessibility.

Is that a problem with the file input button, or with every other button on your website?

The file input button does seem to be a barely remembered feature by browser builders. It's weirdly specific, doesn't work the same way on phones, and probably only hangs around because there isn't a decent alternative.

IIRC correctly, the File Input button was deliberately excluded from CSS styling, as it was felt that it would be abused to 'steal' data from clients, if the user wasn't aware it was file upload...