Explainer for a set of features allowing the creation of CSS customizable carousels.
Carousels are an often used design pattern on the web. They are used in a variety of contexts, from product listing pages to slideshow like content. OpenUI has explored a range of carousel designs, showing that the specific layout and appearance can vary dramatically. They are also provided by many frameworks as components, however implementing a carousel correctly is complicated and often results in inconsistent and sometimes inaccessible implementations.
There are a variety of problems being solved by carousels, which we believe could be provided by a set of CSS features. Developers could then combine these CSS features to create the various designs. CSS-only component libraries could be built to further simplify this process.
Carousels often show multiple items as a single group. Typically the user advances through one group at time.
See the fragmentation explainer for more details.
Many carousels have markers or thumbnails which provide convenient navigation and a sense of overall progress through the carousel.
See the scroll-marker explainer for more details.
Scroll markers, and sometimes other inline content often needs to be placed into a different grid area. Multiple items placed into the same grid area should be able to flow relative to each other. Futher, it may be necessary to allow scrolling on the collection of items placed in an area when it overflows.
See the grid-flow explainer for more details.
Many carousels provide buttons for direct navigation to the next / previous item or page of content.
While they could create these <button> elements as part of the page,
they are not semantically part of the list of items.
Further, the code for these adds a bit of additional complexity.
See the scroll-button explainer for more details.
It is common and recommended practice (See use of aria-hidden) that only content on the active page is included in focus order. Users must use the carousel navigation methods to access content on future pages.
See the inert explainer for more details.
There are a few carousel designs not currently addressed by this proposal. This section enumerates and explores these areas.
Many carousels allow scrolling from the last item in the list to the first, or vice versa. We expect that some form of cyclic overflow support (e.g. #5411) will make this trivial for authors to enable.
In the interim, authors could continue to use script, as they do today, to move content to the start / end of the carousel so that it can continuously scroll, or by overriding the next button behavior when at the last item to scroll back to the beginning.
Auto-advancing carousels introduces many potential accessibility issues if not implemented properly. The Web Accessibility Initiative Carousel Animations guidelines explores the necessary affordances. Most carousel experiences can be authored without automatically advancing sections, and in the mean-time author script could implement the animation following the WAI guidelines.
Using the above features, a carousel can be implemented as a semantic list of items, e.g.:
<ul class="carousel">
<li>Item 1</li>
<li>Item 2</li>
...
</ul>
Where the CSS can turn this into a variety of carousel designs.
The CSS automatically flows the list items into page container pseudo-elements which have individual snap points and scroll markers.
Examples using the polyfill:
There are many other ways that we could deliver these capabilities. This section will collect other potential alternatives with their callenges and advantages.
An element could encapsulate a lot of the features without needing to express them directly as CSS properties. One of the main challenges with this approach is that carousels have a large amount of variation in their designs. This would likely add significant complexity to the design of a high level element, or require some of the individual features proposed anyways.
It would be nice for authors to be able to slot in rich content, as they would with a custom element. For example, they could provide a template of content to be created per page with a slot for the contents of that page.
One challenge is that the original content should retain its original structure. This may be possible by dynamically slotting elements to particular pages in a shadow tree.