HTML5 Placeholder Styling with CSS

http://davidwalsh.name/html5-placeholder-css

By David Walsh on December 27, 2010   

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4/25/2011: This attribute is not styleable as of Opera 11. Internet Explorer 10 will introduceplaceholder support.

Last week I showed you how you could style selected text with CSS. I've searched for more interesting CSS style properties and found another: INPUT placeholder styling. Let me show you how to style placeholder text within INPUTelements with some unique CSS code.

View Demo

The CSS

Firefox employs a different pattern than Safari and Chrome. Each property name is self-explanatory though:

/* all */::-webkit-input-placeholder { color:#f00; }::-moz-placeholder { color:#f00; } /* firefox 19+ */:-ms-input-placeholder { color:#f00; } /* ie */input:-moz-placeholder { color:#f00; }/* individual: webkit */#field2::-webkit-input-placeholder { color:#00f; }#field3::-webkit-input-placeholder { color:#090; background:lightgreen; text-transform:uppercase; }#field4::-webkit-input-placeholder { font-style:italic; text-decoration:overline; letter-spacing:3px; color:#999; }/* individual: mozilla */#field2::-moz-placeholder { color:#00f; }#field3::-moz-placeholder { color:#090; background:lightgreen; text-transform:uppercase; }#field4::-moz-placeholder { font-style:italic; text-decoration:overline; letter-spacing:3px; color:#999; }

You will only want to employ the most basic of styles to the placeholder. Color, font-style, and font-variant are probably the styles you will want to employ. Go too far with your placeholder styling and you may create the animated GIF of input styles. Note that Mozilla Firefox doesn't support placeholder styling until version 4.

View Demo

Styling elements with the placeholder attribute is something you don't need to do but could be just another one of those small details that sets your website apart from other websites. Hopefully IE9 and Opera soon follow suit in allowing styling of placeholder text within INPUT elements...or expose their API for doing so!