Bug 188200 – Feature Request: Allow adding icons/images to <select> and <datalist> <option>s

• Status: NEW
• Component: Forms

[Aleksey]

Images and icons don’t work in <option> elements. In the best case scenario, developers will replace it with a list of <input type="radio"> elements, but even though with a fair bit of work, such a custom control may be made somewhat accessible on desktop, it still creates an inferior form flow experience on mobile in most cases.

There should be a way to render icons/images in the options so that developers wouldn’t have to resort to JavaScript based controls which tend to be bad for accessibility on mobile and desktop. No browser supports this yet. This is a feature proposal that I’m going to do for all browsers. Here’s a discussion on WHATWG’s GitHub about it.

https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/3596

[Aleksey]

Links to bug reports on other browsers:
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=869480
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1479854
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/platform/issues/18470126/