My point was that a general "no app shall customize scrollbar look and feel" is wrong, as there are certain kinds of apps that do benefit from custom look and feel. Sure, not all games, but also games are not so entirely different from other kinds of apps.
Also, I thought the specific points about CSS and how to achieve custom styling if desired are irrelevant. The arguments I was replying to were about UX, not about details of how that is implemented.
> My point was that a general "no app shall customize scrollbar look and feel" is wrong, as there are certain kinds of apps that do benefit from custom look and feel. Sure, not all games, but also games are not so entirely different from other kinds of apps.
But the point is, that your website is not an app. At most it is a web app, and therefore governed by the browser and the user's preferences and choices for the browser.
A website (or website that is a "web app") should fundamentally be a different degree of commitment than installing an application into the user's system. There is a reason for browser sandboxes and for the browser to have its configuration. The browser itself is the actual app and the user should be in control of that, to govern a at least partially unified UX throughout the websites the user visits.
I don't see why there should be any distinction between apps and web apps in terms of UX constraints, and I don't think one has ever existed even since the invention of the Web. After all, Flash is older than JS and much of what people loved on the earlier Web was in fact made with Flash. Similarly, many famous Geocities sites were heavily customized to illustrate their creators' preference.
The web is much more than productivity focused software, and limiting it to some specific notion of dull uniformity in the names of consistency is honestly sad.
If I want to create a site to represent a detailed exploration and appreciation of the Voynich manuscript, why should I not try to style similarly to the original manuscript? Why should utility trump aesthetics for nay document on the web?
The real problem, in my opinion, is that too many websites do this sort of thing. Is there a place for it? Sure. But it should be something that is rarely done.
But I'm only talking about websites, not web apps. I don't use web apps, so have no opinion on them.
A website should fundamentally be a different degree of commitment than installing an application into the user's system
I agree with that, but this is opinion and not fact. There's a lot of money invested in blurring/obviating this distinction, exactly because installing a real app has more hurdles (both for the developer and for the user).
It's very hard to actually write good UX from scratch, particularly stuff like scrollbars that require all sorts of relative resizing, drag listeners, velocity methods, second and tertiary controls (keyboards, drag-selection of text) and often need to handle those things after a variety of user interactions without redrawing their content or slowing anything down by constantly remeasuring the rest of the UI.
Because it's difficult, it's often done poorly, which leads to people thinking it should never be done at all.
To your point about games, I find most custom-written scrollboxes in games to be pretty terrible, but we all kind of appreciate them just for their uniqueness, because as UX items they're generally not something you interact with that much. (Unless you're playing Crusader Kings, in which case ... )
I remember being disgusted and offended by Apple's app developer rules two decades ago, which included dictates such as never implementing your own UX elements like scrollbars. We're still debating whether they were wrong. As long as there are bad ways to build UX elements, some people will do them, and this will serve as proof for a few big companies that it should never be done.
You don't have to write good UX from scratch to get non-OS scrollbars, there are CSS rules that let you style scrollbars while keeping most system scrollbar features and accessibility.
No comment on whether or not that's a good idea, though.
I think in games reimplementing controls is done because of game engines having their own gaming-specific widgets or parts, which are not using the system's widgets themselves. Game creators will make use of the things available in the game engines.
Well like e.g. when I had to write UI elements into first iterations of Star Citizen, those were all in a 2D vector/sprite layer over the 3D world that had to be completely custom coded. Even the shape of the UI was pretty much completely open to interpretation. I have mad respect for people who write their own UI elements and "widgets" into games, given the restrictions that are often involved. Some do it better than others, but therein lies the art of observing and stealing from the best.
Also, I thought the specific points about CSS and how to achieve custom styling if desired are irrelevant. The arguments I was replying to were about UX, not about details of how that is implemented.