Carryover evaluation for Details element

[nairnandu]

Original proposal(s): #871, #768

Tests

All tests
Failing tests

We should also consider whether we add tests for Details element focus area in Interop 2026.

[LeaVerou]

Reporting from the preliminary State of HTML 2025 results here! 🙋🏽‍♀️

When we ranked submitted Interop 2026 proposals by number of freeform pain points across the survey mentioning the feature, <details> came in 3rd. One caveat is that only a small portion of these were interop complaints, but it demonstrates that it matters to devs:

As another signal that it matters to devs, it was the top feature across the survey by % of positive sentiment (interested if hadn't used, positive experience if had used).

Sample quotes

Be nice to have a native expend all option when using details and summary. As a text to speech user, having to click to expend text in details breaks my concentration.

I wish there was more consistent support for this one. I have has colleagues entertain it's use for accordions or even nested menus that wouldn't need to depend on JS

Summary/details, seem like they would be good for dropdowns or expandable content, but are insufficient in accessibility, hover functionality, layout requirements

When using <details> and <summary>, there are times when you want to use summary as a heading element, but the markup summary > hn has practical problems. (poor the role on accessibility)

more of a 'that would be nice' If you could do <summary for=detailsId> outside of the <details name="set"> and then get tabbed sections without CSS or JS

support for animating both dialogs and details elements/elements that use display or content-visibility to hide content have no support on firefox still

summary/details could contain more items like images or paragraphs but this fails on validation. it would make building small sites that accordion open into much bigger ones easy to implement

details summary is nice. but very hard to customize, changing dropdown icon is pain, using custom icons and alignment is another pain. creating our own accordion with divs is easier for developers..

The limitations of details. It'd be great if the summary could be outside the details, and if you could customise the way the content appears.

All main tags should support all main display options. Not being able to properly set fieldset, dialog, details to flex or grid/subgrid forces us to add unecessary divs in order to achieve our desired/required result.

Details, dialogs, popovers – anything that has open/closed state – should have the same API. They don't. The APIs are badly designed.

While interop 2025 will sort the details element. The time of each of the little enhancements by browsers is slow in roll out.

<summary> is often hard to style using CSS because of the default browser styling rules and how it's treated

details, you can't style the summary to be at the bottom when open (or anywhere except the top)

It feels hacky to style and animate details, dialogs, popovers easily and consistently.

Currently quite a convoluted process to make details elements open with a transition

Accessibility. <details/> is less accessible than a hand-made accordion/unfoldable

<details> isn't a11y but it would be so nice to use instead of custom solutions.

With details elements - how to interact with user to open element when printing.

details & summary are too flimsy to style, you can't position the marker freely

[wpt-interop]

Thank you for proposing Carryover evaluation for Details element for Interop 2026.

We want to let you know it was not selected to be part of Interop this year.

On behalf of the entire Interop team, thank you for submitting it for consideration. We got many more proposals than we could include in this year's project, necessitating some difficult choices. Please note this should not be taken as a comment on the technology as a whole, or our willingness to consider it for Interop in the future. We appreciate the work you put into your proposal, and would welcome your participation in future rounds of Interop.

Posted on behalf of the Interop team.