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
    Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS

    Introduction For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular. In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...

  • 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

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!