Customizing Range Sliders: A Comprehensive Guide
Range sliders are an essential tool in web development, allowing users to select a value or filter items based on numeric ranges. They’re commonly used in ecommerce websites, audio and video players, and even for zooming features. However, adding a slider widget to a webpage can be trickier than you might think. In this guide, we’ll show you how to create a custom range slider using only CSS, and take it to the next level with JavaScript.
Understanding the HTML Range Input Type
The simplest form of a range slider is an <input> element of type range. However, this will result in a widget that is inconsistent across browsers. To customize this slider widget, we need to target the different components, including the thumb and slider track.
Why is the Input Range Tricky to Style?
The range slider widget consists of a thumb and a slider track contained within a container input element. However, inspecting the widget from the browser’s dev tools shows that the components are not exposed to us. This is because the range element is implemented as a web component, and browsers internally encapsulate and hide elements and styles that make up the input slider inside a shadow DOM.
Creating a Custom Range Slider with Only CSS
Let’s create a range slider that looks like the one below with a CSS-only solution:
[Image of a custom range slider]
We’ll target the different slider parts to add a custom style. As we don’t have access to the parts directly, we’ll capitalize on the various browser vendor prefixes. For example, to customize the range slider for WebKit and Blink-based browsers, we’ll use the ::-webkit-slider-runnable-track pseudo-element to target the slider track and the ::-webkit-slider-thumb pseudo-element to target the thumb.
Customizing the Slider Track and Thumb
We can style the slider track in two ways. The first method is applying custom styles directly in the input[type="range"] selector. The second method is using the browser’s vendor prefixes to specifically target the slider track.
For the slider thumb, we’ll start by removing the default styles of the native slider thumb and then adding custom styles. We’ll also add a CSS transition property for a smooth transition effect.
Styling the Range Slider to Show Track Progress
Using only CSS, we can style the range slider to show track progress by filling the space to the left of the thumb with box-shadow and then hiding the overflow from the input[type="range"] selector.
Improving the CSS Range Slider with JavaScript
With the addition of JavaScript, we’ll create a range slider that looks like this:
[Image of a custom range slider with JavaScript]
We’ll modify the CSS style rules and apply a bit of JavaScript to achieve the desired design. We’ll also add hover, active, and focus states to provide a visual effect while interacting with the slider.
Adding Tick Marks to a Custom Slider
We can enhance the slider experience by adding tick marks for a more precise metric system. We can achieve that using the <datalist> and <option> elements.
Creating a Vertical Slider
We have various options to create a vertical slider, depending on whether we wish to target the slider alone or both the slider and the surrounding text. If our focus is solely on the default native slider and we want to style it independently, we can achieve a vertical slider system by simply setting the appearance property to slider-vertical for most browsers.
Using CSS Variables to Dynamically Change Slider Properties
For further customization, we’ll cover dynamically changing the slider’s thumb color as it progresses, the theme to match the thumb color, and we will sync the slider progress to these changes. We’ll achieve all of this using CSS variables.
Implementing Responsiveness to Our Range Slider
We may have noticed the range slider is responsive, and we didn’t need to use media queries. This is because we employed the use of responsive viewports and flexbox during development.
By following this guide, you’ll be able to create a custom range slider that looks great and works seamlessly on any browser without sacrificing accessibility.