fallback for html5 placeholders

Anatoly Mironov

March 8, 2012

Placeholders are very handy in html5, we don’t need to fool with input values. But in SharePoint and IE we must provide fallback for placeholders if we want use them in other browsers. Here is an jQuery extension to do that:

(function ($) {
  $.fn.extend({
    ensurePlaceholders: function () {
      var input = document.createElement('input');
      var placeholderSupported = ('placeholder' in input);
      if (placeholderSupported) {
        return;
      }
      function setHints(elem) {
        var $elem = $(elem);
        var value = $elem.val();
        if (value == "") {
          var placeholder = $elem.attr("placeholder");
          $elem.val(placeholder);
          $elem.addClass("empty-text");
        }
      }
      function removeHints(elem) {
        var $elem = $(elem);
        $elem.removeClass("empty-text");
        var value = $elem.val();
        var placeholder = $elem.attr("placeholder");
        if (value == placeholder) {
          $elem.val("");
        }
      }
      this.find("\[placeholder\]").each(function() {
        setHints(this);			
      });
      this.on("focus", "\[placeholder\]", function(e) {
        removeHints(this);
      });
      this.on("blur", "\[placeholder\]", function(e) {
        setHints(this);
      });
    }
  });
})(jQuery);
```Then "ensure placeholders" by running this function on a wrapper element which contains fields with the placeholder attribute:

jQuery("#form-wrapper").ensurePlaceholders();

jQuery(document).ready(function() { jQuery(document).ensurePlaceholders(); });

.empty-text { color: grey; }