Re: place-holding characters in edit/text boxes

What worries me about the single space solution is that if an edit field is
not identifyed by a combination of user agent and at, a space will not
identify it either.  A case to try would be jaws 3.5 with netscape 4.7x
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lauke PH" <P.H.Lauke@salford.ac.uk>
To: "B.K. DeLong" <bkdelong@pobox.com>
Cc: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2003 5:23 AM
Subject: RE: place-holding characters in edit/text boxes



> I'm leaning towards "Enter keyword here" or "Enter search
> keyword". Any
> suggestions?

I usually tend to have a single space as default value. It's unobtrusive
(as opposed to longwinded placeholders such as the ones you mention...sure,
you can use javascript to clear the input onfocus, but that won't prevent
Lynx users and co. from having to painstakingly delete the default value
before
being able to enter their text), and the leading space character that may
be passed on as a result of this can easily be filtered out server-side
(for search boxes, it usually doesn't have any influence on the search
results).

But yes, I'd like to hear other list members' opinions on the "single space"
solution (?)

Patrick
________________________________
Patrick H. Lauke
Webmaster / University of Salford
http://www.salford.ac.uk

Received on Wednesday, 27 August 2003 10:11:29 UTC