Re: place-holding characters in edit/text boxes

On Fri, 23 May 2003, David Woolley wrote:

>
> > I feel that this may be a case of whole legions of Web developers having
> > to do extra work to make up for the failings of but a few programmers
> > (those writing the screen readers).  I do both, so I'm not biased ;-)
>
> Are you sure the placeholders are there for accessibility reasons.

Erm, not so much accessibility as compliance-by-rote with broken checkers.

>	  It's
> become a standard idiom to use a dummy entry in selection lists

I don't think selection lists were the issue.

> give imperative instructions on what to enter there.  Maybe some
> of placeholders are there because of the designer's feeling that they
> must order the user at every opportunity?

Well, just occasionally it can be helpful to pre-fill a field, with
an onfocus event to clear it (as already suggested by someone else).
But that should be an informed decision by the author, not unthinking
compliance.

-- 
Nick Kew

In urgent need of paying work - see http://www.webthing.com/~nick/cv.html