Am 20.03.2013 02:20 schrieb Kit Grose:
In almost every case the placeholder remains visible until the user has begun
typing, as I strongly believe it ought to be remain in the specification, since
it provides the contextual hint for as long as possible.
Do you refer to author implementations via scripting? As in Opera and IE
10, the placeholder gets hidden when the field is focused; thus,
regarding browser implementations, the "almost every case" refers to
Firefox, Chrome, and some versions of Safari.
That it has historically been implemented in a way that implies selectable content is, I
believe, chiefly due to the lack of support for a "right" way to do this (which
has led many developers to implement the placeholder text simply by setting the field's
value to the placeholder text as the simplest implementation).
The current implementations of Firefox and Chrome seem to imply
selectable content at least to some users, as Tim and myself reported in
this thread. Both show the placeholder in a lighter color than the input
text; this does not seem to fully solve the issue, maybe because many
web designers color text in form fields anyway.
The problem is that some users do not even start to type when they see
text in the field they focused. Thus I strongly believe that some
visible hint at the _focusing_ moment would be helpful for these users.
If the Opera and IE behaviour of totally hiding the placeholder is
considered as suboptimal, the placeholder could be blurred, made
semi-transparent or whatever; but I am sure that something should happen
when the control gets focus, and not only when the user starts typing.
