Placeholders and Overflow

By  on  

Oftentimes our search boxes and other form fields get drastically shortened on mobile devices.  Unfortunately in some circumstances the INPUT element's placeholder text doesn't fit within the length of the element, thus displaying an ugly "cut off."  To prevent this ugly display, you can use CSS placeholder styling and text-overflow: ellipsis!

input[placeholder] { text-overflow: ellipsis; }
::-moz-placeholder { text-overflow: ellipsis; } /* firefox 19+ */
input:-moz-placeholder { text-overflow: ellipsis; }

Most developers are unaware of each of the properties and even fewer are aware that they are so perfectly complimentary!

Recent Features

  • By
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

  • By
    CSS Animations Between Media Queries

    CSS animations are right up there with sliced bread. CSS animations are efficient because they can be hardware accelerated, they require no JavaScript overhead, and they are composed of very little CSS code. Quite often we add CSS transforms to elements via CSS during...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Highlighter: A MooTools Search & Highlight Plugin

    Searching within the page is a major browser functionality, but what if we could code a search box in JavaScript that would do the same thing? I set out to do that using MooTools and ended up with a pretty decent solution. The MooTools JavaScript Class The...

  • By
    Image Manipulation with PHP and the GD Library

    Yeah, I'm a Photoshop wizard. I rock the selection tool. I crop like a farmer. I dominate the bucket tool. Hell, I even went as far as wielding the wizard wand selection tool once. ...OK I'm rubbish when it comes to Photoshop.

Discussion

  1. Giona

    Cool! I never thought about it, i just robotically styled the placeholder’s text color and similar, but that’s really a “responsive” glance

  2. Prachi

    Hello Sir

    Is there a way to handle overflow of an input text element? Currently, browsers hide the extra text. You have to scroll to read it completely. What if I wanted to handle it a little differently? For example, show an ellipses? Would you know a possible solution for this?

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!