I have built this fiddle as an example of what I am doing.
What I am trying to do works fine in Firefox. With the font-size being 14px when you open
Like most form controls in HTML, the results of applying CSS to and
elements vary a lot between browsers. Chrome, as you've found, won't let you apply and font styles to an
element directly --- if you do Inspect Element on it, you'll see the
font-size: 14px
declaration is crossed through as if it's been overridden by the cascade, but it's actually because Chrome is ignoring it.
However, Chrome will let you apply font styles to the
Forked to a new JSFiddle to show you what I mean:
http://jsfiddle.net/zRtbZ/