Develop Reference

How to control the font in a form's text input field

I have a <form> with several text input fields like so:
<input id="reg" type="text" name="reg" style="width: 200px;" class="eztext">
in my <script> section just before </body> I have code to select a font for the all these fields:
var el = document.getElementsByClassName("eztext")
for (var i = 0; i < el.length; i++)
{
el[i].style.fontSize = "30px";
el[i].style.backgroundColor = "#00ff00"; // bright green background as diagnostic
}
When I run this for the first time in a browser with a cleared cache, the form looks exactly as expected with a bright green background and if I enter text in the box then it appears with a big 30px font... However, if I have used the form several times before then it appears the browser has remembered several previous entries, i.e. I see some previously entered text already in the form and if I click on the text field I see a menu listing a variety of previously entered strings.
My problem is that both the background color and the font are clearly being set by some other system, the font is not size 30 and the background is not green. Unfortunately, I do not know what thing is controlling the style of the font. I can't find anything in the documentation about the <input> tag.

Browsers save previous input values for the user out of convenience. However, this should not affect the styling of the element(s) at all.
First check that you do not have CSS that gets overwritten somehow.
Order of CSS, both included and inline CSS.
The !important property.
You also seem to be using unnecessary JavaScript to apply your style(s). Is there any deeper meaning to why you're using JavaScript the way you are? You have the selectors available to you to simply go with a normal CSS solution.
As a last resort, you could go for disabling the autocomplete feature, but that should be your last resort, as it is a quality of life improvement for the user to have that available to them. There are multiple ways to do this, the most simple one would be:
<input id="reg" type="text" name="reg" style="width: 200px;" class="eztext" autocomplete="off">
Or for the entire form:
<form autocomplete="off" action="...">
More about disabling input fields here.
If it's about the background styling of the input fields themselves entirely, you can use -webkit CSS properties to get your desired styles.
More about that here.
Provided by # Ramon de Vries in the comment section

Ignoring autocomplete='off' in chrome browser [duplicate]

When using the xhtml1-transitional.dtd doctype, collecting a credit card number with the following HTML
<input type="text" id="cardNumber" name="cardNumber" autocomplete='off'/>
will flag a warning on the W3C validator:
there is no attribute "autocomplete".
Is there a standards-compliant way to disable browser auto-complete on sensitive fields in a form?

Here is a good article from the MDC which explains the problems (and solutions) to form autocompletion.
Microsoft has published something similar here, as well.
To be honest, if this is something important to your users, 'breaking' standards in this way seems appropriate. For example, Amazon uses the 'autocomplete' attribute quite a bit, and it seems to work well.
If you want to remove the warning entirely, you can use JavaScript to apply the attribute to browsers that support it (IE and Firefox are the important browsers) using someForm.setAttribute( "autocomplete", "off" ); someFormElm.setAttribute( "autocomplete", "off" );
Finally, if your site is using HTTPS, IE automatically turns off autocompletion (as do some other browsers, as far as I know).
Update
As this answer still gets quite a few upvotes, I just wanted to point out that in HTML5, you can use the 'autocomplete' attribute on your form element. See the documentation on W3C for it.

I would be very surprised if W3C would have proposed a way that would work with (X)HTML4. The autocomplete feature is entirely browser-based, and was introduced during the last years (well after the HTML4 standard was written).
Wouldn't be surprised if HTML5 would have one, though.
Edit: As I thought, HTML5 does have that feature. To define your page as HTML5, use the following doctype (i.e: put this as the very first text in your source code). Note that not all browsers support this standard, as it's still in draft-form.
<!DOCTYPE html>

HTML 4: No
HTML 5: Yes
The autocomplete attribute is an enumerated attribute. The attribute
has two states. The on keyword maps to the on state, and the off
keyword maps to the off state. The attribute may also be omitted. The
missing value default is the on state. The off state indicates that by
default, form controls in the form will have their autofill field name
set to off; the on state indicates that by default, form controls in
the form will have their autofill field name set to "on".
Reference: W3

No, but browser auto-complete is often triggered by the field having the same name attribute as fields that were previously filled out. If you could rig up a clever way to have a randomized field name, autocomplete wouldn't be able to pull any previously entered values for the field.
If you were to give an input field a name like "email_<?= randomNumber() ?>", and then have the script that receives this data loop through the POST or GET variables looking for something matching the pattern "email_[some number]", you could pull this off, and this would have (practically) guaranteed success, regardless of browser.

No, a good article is here in Mozila Wiki.
I would continue to use the invalid attribute. I think this is where pragmatism should win over validating.

How about setting it with JavaScript?
var e = document.getElementById('cardNumber');
e.autocomplete = 'off'; // Maybe should be false
It's not perfect, but your HTML will be valid.

I suggest catching all 4 types of input:
$('form,input,select,textarea').attr("autocomplete", "off");
Reference:
http://www.w3.org/Submission/web-forms2/#the-autocomplete
http://dev.w3.org/html5/markup/input.html

If you use jQuery, you can do something like that :
$(document).ready(function(){$("input.autocompleteOff").attr("autocomplete","off");});
and use the autocompleteOff class where you want :
<input type="text" name="fieldName" id="fieldId" class="firstCSSClass otherCSSClass autocompleteOff" />
If you want ALL your input to be autocomplete=off, you can simply use that :
$(document).ready(function(){$("input").attr("autocomplete","off");});

Another way - which will also help with security is to call the input box something different every time you display it: just like a captha. That way, the session can read the one-time only input and Auto-Complete has nothing to go on.
Just a point regarding rmeador's question of whether you should be interfering with the browser experience: We develop Contact Management & CRM systems, and when you are typing other people's data into a form you don't want it constantly suggesting your own details.
This works for our needs, but then we have the luxury of telling users to get a decent browser:)
autocomplete='off'

autocomplete="off" this should fix the issue for all modern browsers.
<form name="form1" id="form1" method="post" autocomplete="off"
action="http://www.example.com/form.cgi">
[...]
</form>
In current versions of Gecko browsers, the autocomplete attribute works perfectly. For earlier versions, going back to Netscape 6.2, it worked with the exception for forms with "Address" and "Name"
Update
In some cases, the browser will keep suggesting autocompletion values even if the autocomplete attribute is set to off. This unexpected behavior can be quite puzzling for developers. The trick to really forcing the no-autocompletion is to assign a random string to the attribute, for example:
autocomplete="nope"
Since this random value is not a valid one, the browser will give up.
Documetation

Using a random 'name' attribute works for me.
I reset the name attribute when sending the form so you can still access it by name when the form is sent. (using the id attribute to store the name)

Note that there's some confusion about location of the autocomplete attribute. It can be applied either to the whole FORM tag or to individual INPUT tags, and this wasn't really standardized before HTML5 (that explicitly allows both locations). Older docs most notably this Mozilla article only mentions FORM tag. At the same time some security scanners will only look for autocomplete in INPUT tag and complain if it's missing (even if it is in the parent FORM). A more detailed analysis of this mess is posted here: Confusion over AUTOCOMPLETE=OFF attributes in HTML forms.

Not ideal, but you could change the id and name of the textbox each time you render it - you'd have to track it server side too so you could get the data out.
Not sure if this will work or not, was just a thought.

I think there's a simpler way.
Create a hidden input with a random name (via javascript) and set the username to that. Repeat with the password. This way your backend script knows exactly what the appropriate field name is, while keeping autocomplete in the dark.
I'm probably wrong, but it's just an idea.

if (document.getElementsByTagName) {
var inputElements = document.getElementsByTagName("input");
for (i=0; inputElements[i]; i++) {
if (inputElements[i].className && (inputElements[i].className.indexOf("disableAutoComplete") != -1)) {
inputElements[i].setAttribute("autocomplete","off");
}
}
}

I MADE THIS WORK IN 2020!
I basically create a css class that applies -webkit-text-security to my inputs.
Here's the link to a more recent discussion:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/64471795/8754782

This solution works with me:
$('form,input,select,textarea').attr("autocomplete", "nope");
if you want use autofill in this region: add autocomplete="false" in element
ex:
<input id="search" name="search" type="text" placeholder="Name or Code" autcomplete="false">

Valid autocomplete off
<script type="text/javascript">
/* <![CDATA[ */
document.write('<input type="text" id="cardNumber" name="cardNumber" autocom'+'plete="off"/>');
/* ]]> */
</script>

Placeholder vanish after click on Reset button in IE8

I have a form where an admin can add candidates. When I run my application in IE8, and click on reset button, it removes placeholder from all the fields. I am using placeholder.js to support placeholder property in IE8.
Here is my reset function ...
function resetCandidateData(){
$("#addCandidateForm")[0].reset();
}
My form is like that ....
<form name="addCandidateForm" id="addCandidateForm" method="Post">
<input type="text" name="cname" id="cname" class="inputBox bdr-radius5" placeholder="Enter candidate name" autocomplete="off"/>
.....
.....
<span class="global-button" onclick="resetCandidateData();">Reset</span>
</form>
First time when page refresh, it showing placeholder in each of my textfields in IE8 but after reset all are vanish. Please help.

I don't know anything about the specific placeholder.js library that you're using, and you didn't provide a link, so I can't even tell which one it is.
However, it sounds to me like you need to use a better placeholder script.
If resetting the fields clears the placeholders, then it means that the script is using the field value to display the placeholder.
This is fine, but does have some limitations, in particular as you've seen with resetting the fields, but it also means that you can't have placeholders on a password field (because they would show up as stars like the password itself), and you can't easily have the placeholder styled differently to the field values.
For all these reasons, I prefer a placeholder script that uses a different technique - eg putting the placeholder in its own element and displaying it on top of (or behind) the input field, rather than actually using the input field itself for the placeholder.
So therefore my advice is to find an alternative placeholder script. It should be fairly straightforward to take one out and plug another one in, and there are plenty of them out there to pick from. Take a look here for a list of some of the best ones.
Hope that helps.

Change your resetCandidateData function to
function resetCandidateData(){
$("#addCandidateForm")[0].reset();
$.Placeholder.init();
}
It should restore the placeholders.

Disable editing part of input box

I know I can disable/lock part of an input box using
<input type="text" disabled="disabled"/>
or
<input type="text" readonly="readonly"/>
but I want to have
<input type="text" value="[[inputbox|edithere]]"/>
where the user can only edit edithere
I have tried to google this, however the only related things I can find are how to disable an input box completely or disable certain keys.
I don't know the input boxes id or how many there are (dynamically created via php onload), but I know that they will always be a pipeline and two ]] bookending the value I want to edit.
EDIT
http://jsfiddle.net/7rTMK/

You can't do this with a stock input just manipulating attributes.
However you can simulate this with css and some extra markup:
<div class="wrapper">
<div class="static text">static text</div>
<input class="text" type="text" />
</div>
Position "static text" div on top of the input and add left padding to the input text.
example http://jsfiddle.net/MTEec/

It's impossible. Use a tag to wrap the input, and put the uneditable parts before, or after the input, and style the tag to look like an input, and style the input to match that styling.
If you need the form to send all the data, create a hidden input after your input, and update it's value with JavaScript (to the static and the input's text concatenated) upon changing the value of the main input. That way when the form is sent, the later hidden input with the same name will be used.

While it's not entirely impossible to do, it would be extremely difficult to do and it's a very bad practice to try doing something like that, at least for your use case.
You should obtain the user input without restriction inside your input box, if you want to add square brackets or the such, you can add them later using either Javascript or your service side language.
Alternatively, if you really wish to display the characters inside the textbox, you can use claustrofob's solution and mess around with the CSS.

Allow Copy/Paste in a disabled input text box in Firefox browsers

I have a input text box disabled:
<input type="text" name="name" disabled="disabled" />
In IE and in Chrome you can copy and paste the value populated in that input field but in Firefox you cannot.
Firefox does not allow clipboard manipulation through JavaScript for valid security concerns.
Any suggestion? Is there a work around this?

readonly="readonly" will do the job
it should be supported by the major browsers

I don't like using readonly="readonly", ever. It leaves the field focusable and reachable via tab keypress and, if, god forbid, the user hits the backspace key while the read-only field is focused, then most browsers treat it like the user hit the 'back' button and bring up the previously viewed page. Not what you want to see happen when you're filling out a large form, especially if you are using some archaic browser that doesn't preserve the form data when you hit the 'next' button to return to it. Also very, very bad when using some single-page web application, where 'back' takes you to a whole other world, and 'next' doesn't even restore your form, much less its data.
I've worked around this by rendering DIVs instead of input fields when I need the field disabled (or PRE instead of a textarea). Not always easy to do dynamically but I've managed to make fairly short work of it with AngularJS templates.
If you have time, head over to the Mozilla Bugzilla and ask them to fix it.

tl;dr: Support for selecting and copying text in a disabled field is unreliable; use the readonly attribute or a non-input element, such as a <span> instead, if this functionality is necessary. Use JavaScript to modify the behavior of the readonly input to prevent unwanted behavior such as going back a page when someone hits the backspace key while the readonly input has focus.
*UPDATE: 2018.12.24
The spec has changed since this answer was originally posted (thanks to Wrightboy for pointing this out); it now includes the following caveat with regards to disabled fields:
Any other behavior related to user interaction with disabled controls, such as whether text can be selected or copied, is not defined in this standard.
— https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/input.html#the-readonly-attribute
Disabled fields still cannot receive focus nor click events.
Because the standard does not define whether or not text within disabled controls can be selected or copied and because at least one major browser doesn't support that functionality, it's probably best to avoid relying on that behavior.
Original Answer
This is the expected behavior for a disabled field (as of the original date of this answer). IE and Chrome are being generous, but Firefox is behaving appropriately.
If you want to prevent the user from changing the value of the field, but you still want them to be able to read it, and/or copy it's value, then you should use the readonly attribute. This will allow them to set focus to the element (necessary for copying), and also access the field via the tab button.
If you are concerned about a user accidentally hitting the backspace button inside the readonly field and causing the browser to navigate back a page, you can use the following code to prevent that behavior:
document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function() {
var inputs = document.querySelectorAll('[readonly]');
for(var i=0; i < inputs.length; i++){
inputs[i].addEventListener('keydown', function(e){
var key = e.which || e.keyCode || 0;
if(key === 8){
e.preventDefault();
}
})
}
});
<input value="Hello World" readonly=readonly />

As quick answer, one can have another not disabled element to enable + copy/paste + redisable your input text, like this:
$('#btnCopy').click(function(){
$('#txtInputDisabled').removeAttr('disabled');
$('#txtInputDisabled').select();
document.execCommand("copy");
$('#txtInputDisabled').attr('disabled','disabled');
});
You can se my complete response to this post

Refer to my post to the same question. It does the following:
Makes the textbox just like readonly without using the readonly attribute on the input tag, but will honor tab index and set focus
Supports all clipboard functions win and mac with mouse or keyboard
Allows undo, redo and select all
Restrict HTML input to only allow paste

You can accomplish this in share point by utilizing the contenteditable attribute as follows with jquery.
$("#fieldID").attr("contenteditable", "false");
This will allow the user to highlight the text and copy it but will not allow them to enter anything in the field.