Eric Bailey takes a hardline position on <input placeholder>.
You might be thinking, as I did: yeah, yeah I know the pitfalls. I’m capable of using placeholder responsibly. But when you look at all the negatives together:
- Can’t be automatically translated;
- Is oftentimes used in place of a label, locking out assistive technology;
- Can hide important information when content is entered;
- Can be too light-colored to be legible;
- Has limited styling options;
- May look like pre-filled information and be skipped over.
…and the fact that there are advantages to just moving whatever helper text you would want in there anyway outside the input to real markup…I’m fairly well convinced.
