HTML5 Placeholder jQuery Plugin

Demo & Examples

http://mathiasbynens.be/demo/placeholder

Example Usage

HTML

<input type="text" name="name" placeholder="e.g. John Doe">
<input type="email" name="email" placeholder="e.g. address@example.ext">
<input type="url" name="url" placeholder="e.g. http://mathiasbynens.be/">
<input type="tel" name="tel" placeholder="e.g. +32 472 77 69 88">
<input type="password" name="password" placeholder="e.g. h4x0rpr00fz">
<input type="search" name="search" placeholder="Search this site…">
<textarea name="message" placeholder="Your message goes here"></textarea>

jQuery

Use the plugin as follows:

$('input, textarea').placeholder();

You’ll still be able to use jQuery#val() to get and set the input values. If the element is currently showing a placeholder, .val() will return an empty string instead of the placeholder text, just like it does in browsers with a native @placeholder implementation. Calling .val('') to set an element’s value to the empty string will result in the placeholder text (re)appearing.

CSS

The plugin automatically adds class="placeholder" to the elements who are currently showing their placeholder text. You can use this to style placeholder text differently:

input, textarea { color: #000; }
.placeholder { color: #aaa; }

I’d suggest sticking to the #aaa color for placeholder text, as it’s the default in most browsers that support @placeholder. If you really want to, though, you can style the placeholder text in some of the browsers that natively support it.

Installation

You can install jquery-placeholder by using Bower.

bower install jquery-placeholder

Notes

License

This plugin is available under the MIT license.

Thanks to…

Mathias