How to add a text field in HTML
problem
You’re learning HTML and wish to add a text field/ text box on your web page so the user can type some text inside e.g. the name of a place. In this post we will see how to add one.
SOLUTION
Using the <input> tag. With this tag we can further specify by using the type attribute what type of user input we wish to use. In this case for a text field we need to specify the type=”text”.
For example:
<input type="text" />
output
In the screenshot above we can see the text box appears on the web page. We can click on it and type some text as shown below:
By clicking on it, we can type anything we wish, without any limitation.
(Note): The blue color on the borders of the text box is added by default depending on which web browser (user-agent) is used. These are the user-agent stylesheet. [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Cascade#user-agent_stylesheets]
Adding default text/ value
We can use the attribute value if we wish to put some text by default. For example, if we use value=”London”, the web browser will show London in the text box when the page loads up. And, the user can change it.
For example:
<input type="text" value="London" />
output
Making it disabled
If we wish to disallow the user to edit the text field, we can use the attribute disabled. It accepts a boolean value (true, false). We can omit setting the value to true if we wish. The following 2 have the same result:
<input type="text" value="London" disabled />
<input type="text" value="London" disabled=true />
output
As you can see the text field appears grayed out and the user cannot click on it; so it cannot change it.
Similarly we can use the attribute readonly that has a similar effect. The text cannot be changed but the text field is clickable.
For example:
<input type="text" value="London" readonly />
output
disabled vs readonly
When using the disabled attribute, the text field is not even clickable. When using the readonly though, the text field can be clicked (focused) and the user can select/highlight the text for copying.
Limiting characters on text field
We can limit the number of characters our user can type by setting the attribute maxLength and use a number. For example, let’s set it to 5 characters:
<input type="text" maxlength="5" />
By adding maxlength=”5″, the user is allowed to type up to 5 characters including any whitespace.
output
Adding a placeholder
We can specify a default text to appear only when the text field is empty. This is called a placeholder. Simply, we specify it with the attribute placeholder.
For example:
<input type="text" placeholder="What's your name?" />
output
Cool.
conclusion
In this post we saw how to use the <input> tag with the type=”text” attribute to create a text field/ text box on a web page.
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Ellion
Professional IT consultant, writer, programmer enthusiast interested in all sorts of coding.
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