Now we have something else to be thankful for. Nathan Smith of Sonspring has created a library that gives designers and developers “some measure of control over form elements, without changing them so drastically as to appear foreign in a user’s operating system.” Smith calls his new library Formalize CSS:

I’ve attempted to bridge the gap between various browsers and OS’s, taking the best ideas from each, and implementing what is possible across the board. For the most part, this means most textual form elements have a slight inset, and all buttons look consistent, including the button tag.

For more, including demos, options, screenshots, thanks, and the library itself, read Smith’s write-up at SonSpring | Formalize CSS. Hat tip and happy Thanksgiving to my good friend Aaron Gustafson for sharing this gem.

In response to a discussion of why the window handle limit is 10,000,
commenter Juan wondered

why we don't create a special class of programs which can
exceed the 10,000 handle limit and otherwise bypass
the normal operation of the system.

This is another case of the tragedy of special treatment:

Eventually, nothing is special any more.

If there were a way for an application to say,
"Hey, I don't want to be constrained by the normal rules
that apply to your everyday boring applications,"
then every application would simply say it,
and the net effect would be that the constraint
no longer applies to anybody.

Task Manager conforms to the normal rules for GUI programs
because

if it marked itself as special,
soon everybody would mark themselves as special in order
to get the same special treatment.
(Besides, the special treatment doesn't help Task Manager at all,
since Task Manager doesn't create 10,000 handles.
The specific issue in the comment is not something Task Manager
even knows that it needs to opt out of.
All it did was call CreateWindow;
Task Manager shouldn't need to know about the internal implementation of
CreateWindow.)

Bonus chatter:
There is already

one mechanism for applications to say that
a particular class of restrictions should not apply to them.