Placeholder Not Working for Internet Explorer

Placeholder not working with internet explorer

Finally found how to resolve this issue, the emulation was set at 9 as default on the debugger's screen even if internet explorer 11 was being used, so I added this on the head tag of the HTML.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=11">

Which changes the compatability format to IE11.

Placeholder not working for Internet Explorer

You can imitate this using pure JavaScript:

var _debug = false;
var _placeholderSupport = function() {
    var t = document.createElement("input");
    t.type = "text";
    return (typeof t.placeholder !== "undefined");
}();

window.onload = function() {
    var arrInputs = document.getElementsByTagName("input");
    var arrTextareas = document.getElementsByTagName("textarea");
    var combinedArray = [];
    for (var i = 0; i < arrInputs.length; i++)
        combinedArray.push(arrInputs[i]);
    for (var i = 0; i < arrTextareas.length; i++)
        combinedArray.push(arrTextareas[i]);
    for (var i = 0; i < combinedArray.length; i++) {
        var curInput = combinedArray[i];
        if (!curInput.type || curInput.type == "" || curInput.type == "text" || curInput.type == "textarea")
            HandlePlaceholder(curInput);
        else if (curInput.type == "password")
            ReplaceWithText(curInput);
    }

    if (!_placeholderSupport) {
        for (var i = 0; i < document.forms.length; i++) {
            var oForm = document.forms[i];
            if (oForm.attachEvent) {
                oForm.attachEvent("onsubmit", function() {
                    PlaceholderFormSubmit(oForm);
                });
            }
            else if (oForm.addEventListener)
                oForm.addEventListener("submit", function() {
                    PlaceholderFormSubmit(oForm);
                }, false);
        }
    }
};

function PlaceholderFormSubmit(oForm) {    
    for (var i = 0; i < oForm.elements.length; i++) {
        var curElement = oForm.elements[i];
        HandlePlaceholderItemSubmit(curElement);
    }
}

function HandlePlaceholderItemSubmit(element) {
    if (element.name) {
        var curPlaceholder = element.getAttribute("placeholder");
        if (curPlaceholder && curPlaceholder.length > 0 && element.value === curPlaceholder) {
            element.value = "";
            window.setTimeout(function() {
                element.value = curPlaceholder;
            }, 100);
        }
    }
}

function ReplaceWithText(oPasswordTextbox) {
    if (_placeholderSupport)
        return;
    var oTextbox = document.createElement("input");
    oTextbox.type = "text";
    oTextbox.id = oPasswordTextbox.id;
    oTextbox.name = oPasswordTextbox.name;
    //oTextbox.style = oPasswordTextbox.style;
    oTextbox.className = oPasswordTextbox.className;
    for (var i = 0; i < oPasswordTextbox.attributes.length; i++) {
        var curName = oPasswordTextbox.attributes.item(i).nodeName;
        var curValue = oPasswordTextbox.attributes.item(i).nodeValue;
        if (curName !== "type" && curName !== "name") {
            oTextbox.setAttribute(curName, curValue);
        }
    }
    oTextbox.originalTextbox = oPasswordTextbox;
    oPasswordTextbox.parentNode.replaceChild(oTextbox, oPasswordTextbox);
    HandlePlaceholder(oTextbox);
    if (!_placeholderSupport) {
        oPasswordTextbox.onblur = function() {
            if (this.dummyTextbox && this.value.length === 0) {
                this.parentNode.replaceChild(this.dummyTextbox, this);
            }
        };
    }
}

function HandlePlaceholder(oTextbox) {
    if (!_placeholderSupport) {
        var curPlaceholder = oTextbox.getAttribute("placeholder");
        if (curPlaceholder && curPlaceholder.length > 0) {
            Debug("Placeholder found for input box '" + oTextbox.name + "': " + curPlaceholder);
            oTextbox.value = curPlaceholder;
            oTextbox.setAttribute("old_color", oTextbox.style.color);
            oTextbox.style.color = "#c0c0c0";
            oTextbox.onfocus = function() {
                var _this = this;
                if (this.originalTextbox) {
                    _this = this.originalTextbox;
                    _this.dummyTextbox = this;
                    this.parentNode.replaceChild(this.originalTextbox, this);
                    _this.focus();
                }
                Debug("input box '" + _this.name + "' focus");
                _this.style.color = _this.getAttribute("old_color");
                if (_this.value === curPlaceholder)
                    _this.value = "";
            };
            oTextbox.onblur = function() {
                var _this = this;
                Debug("input box '" + _this.name + "' blur");
                if (_this.value === "") {
                    _this.style.color = "#c0c0c0";
                    _this.value = curPlaceholder;
                }
            };
        }
        else {
            Debug("input box '" + oTextbox.name + "' does not have placeholder attribute");
        }
    }
    else {
        Debug("browser has native support for placeholder");
    }
}

function Debug(msg) {
    if (typeof _debug !== "undefined" && _debug) {
        var oConsole = document.getElementById("Console");
        if (!oConsole) {
            oConsole = document.createElement("div");
            oConsole.id = "Console";
            document.body.appendChild(oConsole);
        }
        oConsole.innerHTML += msg + "<br />";
    }
}

This will do nothing if the browser is already supporting the placeholder attribute, and in case it's not supported (e.g. the browser is IE) it will add very similar functionality - text shown by default that disappear on focus and appears again if user didn't type anything.

Live test case.

Bug Fixes

Nov 6, 2012: Previous code failed to detect when browser didn't have native support for placeholder. Using code found in this other post it's now fixed. Affected browsers: IE7 and IE8, maybe others as well. Also added debug support to help debug future problems.

Jan 30, 2013:

1. Adding support for password input as well. Since IE8 and below won't allow dynamic change of input type, the code is replacing the password input with text input as long as there is no password typed, thus the placeholder text will be visible.

2. Fixed bug that caused the placeholder value to be sent where empty value should be sent to the server when the form associated with the input is being submitted. To achieve this, code is attached to the form submit event and clear the value if needed.

Jan 24, 2014: adding support for <textarea> elements.

Placeholder CSS not being applied in IE 11

Further to what Raj answered, when using vendor prefixes the selectors need to be separated into their own rule sets for each prefix.

The reason for this is that to enable the CSS language to advance, browsers need to drop selectors or declarations they do not understand. This allows new features to be be added without the worry that old browsers will interpret it in a different way other than just dropping it.

When using the comma combinator to combine the various pseudo classes, you turn it into one selector, and the browser needs to understand the entire thing to apply that rule set.

Instead you should make a new rule set for each vendor prefixed pseudo class/element. Unfortunately it is a lot of repetition, but that is the price for using experimental CSS.

Input placeholders for Internet Explorer

In looking at the "Web Forms : input placeholder" section of HTML5 Cross Browser Polyfills, one I saw was jQuery-html5-placeholder.

I tried the demo out with IE9, and it looks like it wraps your <input> with a span and overlays a label with the placeholder text.

<label>Text:
  <span style="position: relative;">
    <input id="placeholder1314588474481" name="text" maxLength="6" type="text" placeholder="Hi Mom">
    <label style="font: 0.75em/normal sans-serif; left: 5px; top: 3px; width: 147px; height: 15px; color: rgb(186, 186, 186); position: absolute; overflow-x: hidden; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;" for="placeholder1314588474481">Hi Mom</label>
  </span>
</label>

There are also other shims there, but I didn't look at them all. One of them, Placeholders.js, advertises itself as "No dependencies (so no need to include jQuery, unlike most placeholder polyfill scripts)."

Edit: For those more interested in "how" that "what", How to create an advanced HTML5 placeholder polyfill which walks through the process of creating a jQuery plugin that does this.

Also, see keep placeholder on focus in IE10 for comments on how placeholder text disappears on focus with IE10, which differs from Firefox and Chrome. Not sure if there is a solution for this problem.

:-ms-input-placeholder is not working in IE9 in Windows 7 OS

According to MSDN, in order for this selector to work you need to have at least IE 10. Also, after further investigation -- since it is not supported in IE9 there are other workarounds to getting it to work as desired.

Please check out this SO answer or this alternative JS here.

Text input placeholders not displaying in IE and Firefox

As luke2012 stated this happens when box-sizing: border-box; is being used on text type input fields. However this only happens when a fixed height is being used (such as in the Bootstrap framework) and there is too much top and bottom padding. Which not only prevents placeholder text from displaying but also input text as well in Firefox.

I find that the better solution is to keep box-sizing: border-box; and to instead remove the top and bottom padding and increase the height to the total height that you want the input field to have (including any border).

input[type="email"], input[type="password"], input[type="text"] 
{
    -webkit-box-sizing: border-box;
    -moz-box-sizing: border-box;
    box-sizing: border-box;
    height: 42px; // Increase height as required
    margin-bottom: 30px;
    padding: 0 20px; // Now only left & right padding
}

This keeps things more consistent and works well on frameworks such as Bootstrap.

Alternatively, you could increase the fixed height or set height: auto; and adjust the top and bottom padding as required.

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