Add HTML5 'placeholder' attribute support to form fields.

[rich@…]

HTML5 introduces a 'placeholder' attribute to form inputs, providing a text hint which disappears when the user highlights it, which greatly improves the UX of a page.

To do this in Django currently, you have to do something like:

comment = forms.CharField(max_length=200, widget=forms.TextInput({ "placeholder": "Text!"}))

However, to do this with a ModelForm is much more complicated: ​http://bitkickers.blogspot.com/2010/09/django-html5-input-placeholders.html

I suggest that there should be an easier way to set placeholder text in form fields and model form fields:

comment = forms.CharField(max_length=200, placeholder="Text!")

(This would also be a good starting point for other new HTML5 input elements, such as 'required' and 'email', but those should be separate tickets. The code would be very similar though.)
What do you think?

[Stephen Burrows]

This is related to ticket #15924, and in fact fills the requirements listed there for not being closed. As long as a patch doesn't break backwards compatibility, it should be fine. Note, however, that it's much more likely to happen if you yourself make the patch.

[Dougal Matthews]

I think this ticket needs to be coordinated with the form rendering GSOC as a number of changes are being made in this area. Thus you may want to add it to the discussion on the mailing list: ​https://groups.google.com/d/topic/django-developers/N5EVJhb9la4/discussion

[Andy Venet]

Patch for adding placeholder attribute on CharField class

[Kushagra Sinha]

Adds placeholder attribute functionality to Model forms and normal forms. Has docs. Does not have tests

[Kushagra Sinha]

I have added the said functionality to both model forms and normal forms, in 16304.patch.

However, I suggest to club this ticket with a bigger undertaking of making Django HTML5 aware.

[Kushagra Sinha]

Adds placeholder attribute functionality to forms. Has docs. Has tests.

[Kushagra Sinha]

Based on the discussions on dev mailing list, I have removed placeholder attribute from ModelForms.

The submitted patch adds a placeholder attribute to Forms. ModelForms will have to be manually overridden to add a placeholder attribute. Has tests and documentation.

[Artem Skoretskiy]

Any blockers for landing it in the master? It looks like it is done but not merged for some reason.

It is really needed and useful feature, it improves user experience without tons of workarounds.

Just to note -- all major browsers already support it for more than a year:

browser: Firefox Safari	Chrome	Opera	IE	iPhone	Android
version: 4.0+	 4.0+	4.0+	11.0+	10.0+	4.0+	2.1+

[Łukasz Rekucki]

Is there any reason why this is added only to CharField? placeholder is more of a widget thing, so it shouldn't matter on what type of field I define it as long as I use a widget that can render it. placeholder is also legal on <textarea> not only variations of <input type="...">.