No, that's one of their limitations. (Well, styling can be done to some extent with CSS variables and the shadow DOM, I think.)

Ok, so as someone new-ish to web programming, how should I understand the current relevance of 2012's Extensible Web Manifesto, and the dissatisfaction you're expressing about <datalist> and about Web Components?

I'm sure it's due to a failure of imagination, maybe my own or maybe more widespread, but I don't actually know what you'd rather have, since it seems that there is still no concrete (even experimental) prototypes for kind of custom elements that you're envisioning. What am I missing?

So I'd prefer either:

- built-in elements that cover common elements like autocompletes or typeahead elements that allow e.g. the inclusion of images and formatting with their suggestions, or

- custom elements to work well enough in practice that those elements would have been created by third parties and would be widely used now.

I don't know whether the latter is actually possible, but I'm lamenting the fact that a focus on that goal seems to have coincided with hardly any attention being given to the former.