Re: Styling HTML placeholder attribute

Deliberately hyper-snipping, because you already agree with me on the
desired solution anyway. ^_^

On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 10:18 AM, Arron Eicholz
<Arron.Eicholz@microsoft.com> wrote:
> But again this is not the real topic of this discussion the topic is what
> is 'placeholder'? Not what can we set on the 'placeholder'. These are
> two separate issues that should be addressed separately.

No, and Sylvain's similar assertion is similarly wrong.

Arguments from theoretical purity are interesting and all, but that's
the lowest level in the hierarchy of constituents.  The most important
thing is to figure out what kind of styling would produce the desired
effect for placeholder text, and then we reason backwards from there
to figure out what kind of properties and/or selectors we need to
achieve that effect in the best manner.  Trying to do it in reverse is
architecture astronautics, and often has bad results, as it is
explicitly trying to reach a decision without reasoning about
author/user/etc concerns.

Going from the proper way to deciding these things, it's reasonable to
assert that partially-transparent text is a pretty good way to achieve
the effect we want (text that always looks like a "washed-out" version
of normal text).  We can then reason backwards from there and figure
out what solution is best, based on how well it implement that styling
and what additional kinds of problems the solution can incidentally
solve.

~TJ

Received on Thursday, 24 January 2013 18:33:41 UTC