Hey! Actually that is possible using the <datalist> element.

If you're interested, I wrote a bit more about it here: https://harrisonbroadbent.com/blog/cool-native-html-elements...

As I remember the arguments from 20 years ago, there was strong pushback against changing any form inputs, which the people who did such work said should appear as the operating system itself styled them (so users would recognize them as form inputs).

Should be able to style more than just selects, after all. Why the fuck can't I change the mask character in a password field to be something other than bullets? Hah. I had better examples too, but it looks like in the past 10 years or so, they've slowly been CSS-ized. Nice. Now if I could just style half the first line (first-line does the entirety of the line or nothing).

There is no one truly in charge, it's a distributed standard

Because HTML historically was designed for marking up text articles by hand rather than building UI with tools.

Priorities? Profit incentives?

I don't see how it would create a loop? It seems like the parser change only impacts <select>'s descendant elements (to stop "cleaning" them of illegal elements), not <select> itself.