Articles Tagged placeholder

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

Andrew Coyle on when to use <input placeholder>:

• Don't use them as a label
• Don't use them as a secondary label
• Don't use them as example input
• Don't use them as helper text

Which amounts to pretty much: "Don't use them". Notice there are no examples of good use cases, and even the examples in the "Do" graphics just say "Placeholder Text", which isn't exactly demonstrative of usefulness.

I wonder if placeholder text will fall completely out of favor.… Read article