Is it possible to style the drop-down suggestions when using HTML5 <datalist>?

Question

See here: http://jsfiddle.net/zemar (Must use Firefox or Opera to see)

When you click on the select, the drop-down is styled to match, but if you start typing a term from the data-list in the text box the suggestions that appear aren't styled and therefore it doesn't match the rest of the styling.

Is it possible to style the drop-down?

* {margin:0; padding:0; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 40px; font-weight: bold; color: #444;}
body {height:100%; background:#F4F3EF;}
.select select, .input input {background: transparent; width: 220px; overflow:hidden; height: 65px; padding-left: 5px;
    padding-bottom: 5px; -webkit-appearance: none; -moz-appearance:none; appearance:none; border:none; cursor:pointer;}
.select select {padding-top: 5px;}
.select, .input {float:left; width: 220px; height: 65px; margin-right: 20px; overflow: hidden; background: #ddd;
    border: 1px solid #ccc;}

    <div class="select">
    <select id="count">
            <option value="1">A</option>
            <option value="2">A pair of</option>
            <option value="3">A few</option>
            <option value="4">Four</option>
    </select>
    </div>
    <div class="input">
        <input type="text" id="query" list="ingredients" placeholder="lamb"></input>
        <datalist id="ingredients">
            <option value="lamb">
            <option value="beef">
            <option value="chicken">
            <option value="fish">
            <option value="vegetarian">
        </datalist>
    </div>

Answer 1

From the best of my knowledge you cannot style the <datalist> tag. I recommend using the JQuery extension autocomplete. So you're need to include JQuery in your html document. here is a link hosted by Google: See here

<script src="//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.10.2/jquery.min.js"></script

Note: you can get better performance by including this at the end of the document and using $(document).ready();

For example:

HTML:

<input type='text' id='input'>

Javascript:

$(document).ready(function() {
    var arrayOfOptions = [
        "Option 1",
        "Option 2",
        "etc"
    ];

    $("#input").autocomplete({source: arrayOfOptions});
});

note: not tested code!

Source: http://jqueryui.com/autocomplete/

You can style this similarly to how you style a nav. Here are some classes you can style:

.ui-autocomplete span.hl_results {background-color: #ffff66;}
.ui-autocomplete-loading {} //the object while it's loading (in the event of Ajax, in this case would not need this one
.ui-autocomplete {
    max-height: 250px;
    overflow-y: auto;
    overflow-x: hidden;
    padding-right: 5px;
}

.ui-autocomplete li {font-size: 16px;}
html .ui-autocomplete {
    height: 250px;
}

Answer 2

Styling datalist with CSS only is not possible across browsers. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Edge apply basic styling to the input[list] element, but neither to datalist, nor to its option child elements.

See CodePen example.

Citing from MDN “Styling HTML forms – the ugly”:

Some elements simply can't be styled using CSS. These include: all advanced user interface widgets, such as range, color, or date controls; and all the dropdown widgets, including <select>, <option>, <optgroup> and <datalist> elements.

A very common way to circumvent this UI limitation is to provide a JavaScript based widget, that falls back to the HTML5 input+datalist combination for users which have JS disabled.