[whatwg] Customize HTML5 forms placeholder style

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 10:29 AM, Mounir Lamouri
<mounir.lamouri at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am working on placeholder implementation on Gecko and I am face of the
> placeholder style customization. Indeed, a website can style the
> input/textearea element which can make default placeholder style
> inappropriate.
> The trivial idea is to create a CSS pseudo-element to style the
> placeholder. I am going to implement that [1] as Webkit did [2].
> But the properties that will apply to the pseudo-element should be
> limited. Probably only those related to the font.
>
> At the moment, it looks like there is no specification about the style
> customization of the placeholder. Maybe it would be appropriate to
> specify one ?
>
> [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=457801
> [2] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21227

I agree that having a pseudoelement for the placeholder text is a good
idea.  Perhaps you could bring it up on the www-style list so we can
decide precisely what properties should apply to it?  It seems
reasonable to apply the same restrictions that we currently put on
::first-line (http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/selector.html#first-line-pseudo,
last paragraph of the section).

~TJ