[whatwg] The placeholder attribute - Last Call Comment/Question

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 4:34 PM, Garrett Smith <dhtmlkitchen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Comment on 4.10.5.2.11 The placeholder attribute:
>
> What is the user-interaction behavior for this? Should the behavior be
> specified, or should this be implementation-dependent?

I believe that there's currently no specific behavior, beyond the
requirements listed at
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/common-input-element-attributes.html#the-placeholder-attribute
regarding displaying the value of @placeholder when the input is empty
and unfocused.  It does give a suggestion for how to display this at
the end of that paragraph, though (displaying it inside the input,
which is how we're all used to placeholders working).

Currently, though, if a UA wanted to display it differently, they could.

> http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-placeholder-attribute
> (is this the correct URL?)

There's nothing wrong with that url, it's just generated last in the
chain and so might be a little bit behind (just barely), and uses w3c
styling rather than whatwg styling.  The primary document is the
single-page version at whatwg.org, and the multipage version at
whatwg.org is just slightly behind that.

~TJ