On Sep 29, 2008, at 5:20 PM, Andy Lyttle wrote:
Hi all!
I would like to see Apple's <input type="search"> adopted as an
official standard, but there's one particular feature that would be
easy to adopt without supporting the rest, and that's the
"placeholder" option. Currently, lots of sites are implementing
placeholder text through a combination of creative CSS and
JavaScript hacking, but each site has to reinvent the wheel, and
very often the wheel gets reinvented badly (examples below). Making
it a standard feature of HTML would eliminate the need for all the
extra scripting and improve accessibility, and consistent behavior
would make a better user experience.
[... snip examples ...]
As you can see, that's seven different behaviors, some of which are
clearly not ideal, and all of which require JavaScript, which takes
time to implement, test in multiple browsers, and debug. Supporting
the placeholder attribute (which is already implemented in one major
browser) would solve all of these problems.
Comments?
I would love to see the placeholder="" attribute (and, independently,
<input type="search">) become standard parts of HTML5. We invented
these extensions originally for non-Web content, but they seem useful
for the Web and of interest to Web content authors.
Regards,
Maciej
