Introducing Multirange: A tiny polyfill for HTML5.1 two-handle sliders

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multirangeAs part of my preparation for my talk at CSSDay HTML Special, I was perusing the most recent HTML specs (WHATWG Living Standard, W3C HTML 5.1) to see what undiscovered gems lay there. It turns out that HTML sliders have a lot of cool features specced that aren’t very well implemented:

I made a quick testcase for all three, and to my disappointment (but not to my surprise), support was extremely poor. I was most excited about the last one, since I’ve been wanting range sliders in HTML for a long time. Sadly, there are no implementations. But hey, what if I could create a polyfill by cleverly overlaying two sliders? Would it be possible? I started experimenting in JSBin last night, just for the lolz, then soon realized this could actually work and started a GitHub repo. Since CSS variables are now supported almost everywhere, I’ve had a lot of fun using them. Sure, I could get broader support without them, but the code is much simpler, more elegant and customizable now. I also originally started with a Bliss dependency, but realized it wasn’t worth it for such a tiny script.

So, enjoy, and contribute!

Multirange