Placeholder in contenteditable - focus event issue

Question

I have been trying to ask this before, without any luck of explaining/proving a working example where the bug happens. So here is another try:

I’m trying to replicat

Answer 1

I found that the best way to do this is to use the placeholder attribute like usual and add a few lines of CSS.

HTML

CSS

[contenteditable][placeholder]:empty:before {
    content: attr(placeholder);
    color: #bababa;
}

Note: the CSS :empty selector only works if there is literally nothing in-between the opening and closing tag. This includes new lines, tabs, empty space, etc.

Codepen