[whatwg] Should editable elements have placeholder attribute?

[Ryosuke Niwa]

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 10:15 AM, Charles Pritchard <chuck at jumis.com> wrote:

> On 5/2/12 10:08 AM, Ryosuke Niwa wrote:
>
>> On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 10:06 AM, Ojan Vafai<ojan at chromium.org>  wrote:
>>
>>  I'm OK with having when the placeholder is displayed be up to the UA. I
>>> can see that being platform specific.
>>>
>>> But, we should spec when content is eligible for showing a placeholder
>>> (i.e. we should define what "looks empty" means). I don't see any benefit
>>> in browsers behaving differently here. This part is not
>>> platform-specific.
>>> It's just hard to figure out how to spec it.
>>>
>>>  Maybe when element.innerText or element.textContent is empty?
>>
>
> Is this something we might have a CSS selector for in the future?
>

Sounds reasonable. We already have empty pseudo element but that won't
apply to div with just <br>.

So we'd have a css selector of something like:
>
> ul[text()=""] { content: attr(placeholder); }
>

Such a CSS selector will be very expensive to implement. I don't think we
want something that generic. I think just adding a pseudo element that
matches a visibly empty element will be fine.

- Ryosuke