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
    CSS vs. JS Animation: Which is Faster?

    How is it possible that JavaScript-based animation has secretly always been as fast — or faster — than CSS transitions? And, how is it possible that Adobe and Google consistently release media-rich mobile sites that rival the performance of native apps? This article serves as a point-by-point...

  • By
    Responsive and Infinitely Scalable JS Animations

    Back in late 2012 it was not easy to find open source projects using requestAnimationFrame() - this is the hook that allows Javascript code to synchronize with a web browser's native paint loop. Animations using this method can run at 60 fps and deliver fantastic...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    New MooTools Plugin:  ElementFilter

    My new MooTools plugin, ElementFilter, provides a great way for you to allow users to search through the text of any mix of elements. Simply provide a text input box and ElementFilter does the rest of the work. The XHTML I've used a list for this example...

  • By
    Creating the Treehouse Frog Animation

    Before we start, I want to say thank you to David for giving me this awesome opportunity to share this experience with you guys and say that I'm really flattered. I think that CSS animations are really great. When I first learned how CSS...

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!