I've been going for years creating standard driven websites, then in the space of a few days I get asked to stuff the standards twice! This time the client wanted custom scroll bars which would integrate with the page style and create a "full browser experience". I tried to point out that this sort of practice died out along with IE5 and the pop-up blizzard in 1999 but they were adamant.

So I got my thinking cap on. It's perfectly possible to do this in IE5/6 but all the modern browsers completely ignore any styling which tries to alter the way the browser application itself displays. As it happens the solution has been out there for a while, is open source and is really quite elegant.

jScollPane runs on the jQuery library, and allows you to create degradable JS driven scroll bars, which you can customise to your heart's content. The solution the client went for in  the end was to have a fixed-height page container with a jScrollPane driven "div" in the middle which could scroll using the custom styling. If JS is turned off in the browser, then the user just gets whatever the browser renders for them.

And I have to say.. despite all my posturing on standards, it does look pretty good!