Comments on: defaultValueActsAsHint

By: 6265565

6265565 — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 08:13:44 +0000

It’s currently at version 2.0.2, and has lots more options than just clearing/populating the inputs, such as conditional classes for styling, and clearing unchanged values on submit.

By: dustincaruso

dustincaruso — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 17:47:44 +0000

We’ve been doing this in schmedley on a bunch of our schmidgets and we’re using MooTools. After reading this article I was inspired to make a similar contribution – so, I made some quick edits to the code we’ve created and have posted an article with a MooTools class for this functionality on my site – http://dustincaruso.com/2009/01/defaultvalueactsashint/

By: manalang

manalang — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 05:35:26 +0000

Here’s an improved jQuery plugin that doesn’t use the value attribute because @oopstudio and @anewton’s concerns above. This version won’t change the value after a refresh since it uses a title attribute instead.

http://gist.github.com/46340

By: remy

remy — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 23:14:26 +0000

Am I missing something, or is this virtually the same thing as this plugin – written 2 years ago:

http://remysharp.com/2007/01/25/jquery-tutorial-text-box-hints/

and:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/makingcompactformsmoreaccessible

There’s another version that was written about 6-9 months ago too – but I can’t remember the link.

Have I missed the point – hasn’t this pattern been implemented time and time again?

By: oopstudios

oopstudios — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 22:29:01 +0000

It’s a flawed implementation, if you are halfway through a form and refresh the page then _default is set to the halfway value. Definately a bad bit of code! Kinda OK for freckle as the form is so small, but I’d reccomend against it.

By: icoloma

icoloma — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 13:59:40 +0000

I loved this implementation, but I agree further work would be nice to clear the values on form submission and supporting also select fields. Nice work,though.

By: alexrabarts

alexrabarts — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 02:31:16 +0000

An issue with using the value attribute is that it can be overwirtten when a user hits the back button after submitting the form, leaving your hint text as the value just submitted.

I’ve published a jQuery implementation on GitHub that gets around this issue and the accessibility issue of not providing a label – by default, it grabs the value from the label and moves the label off-screen. You can override this behaviour if you want to use the value attribute, though.

http://github.com/alexrabarts/jquery-clearinginput

By: anewton

anewton — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:42:47 +0000

For MooTools: http://www.clientcide.com/wiki/cnet-libraries/09-forms/05-overtext

By: twoism

twoism — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:50:58 +0000

In Jquery:
(function($){ $.fn.defaultValueActsAsHint = function(){ $(this).focus(function(){ if(this._default != this.value) return; this.value = ""; }).removeClass('hint').blur(function(){ if(this.value != '') return; this.value = this._default; }).addClass('hint').get(0)._default = this.val(); }; })(jQuery);

By: atnan

atnan — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 13:28:31 +0000

If you’re interested in a slightly more robust solution that doesn’t require you to manually call defaultValueActsAsHint() on each element you’d like to “hint”, you should check out my Ghostie project on Github (http://github.com/atnan/ghostie/tree/master), which allows you to add a CSS class of “ghostie” to any text/password field and it will automatically pull the value specified in the “title” attribute in as the default text. It also ensures that the default value is cleared if the form is submitted, and also adds a class of “ghostied” when the default value is populated so that you can style the default state easily.

By: akuzemchak

akuzemchak — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 13:20:59 +0000

jQuery users should check out ToggleVal. It's currently at version 2.0.2, and has lots more options than just clearing/populating the inputs, such as conditional classes for styling, and clearing unchanged values on submit.