How to set placeholder value using CSS?

Question

I want to set the placeholder value of an input box using only css and not JavaScript or jQuery. How can I do this?

Answer 1

I recently had to do this with google's search box, this is an extreme hack reserved for extreme situations (the resulting selector was slightly different, but I made it work in this example)

/*
 this is just used to calculate the resulting svg data url and need not be included in the final page
*/

var text = placeholder.outerHTML;
 var url = "data:image/svg+xml;,"+text.replace(/id="placeholder"/g," ").replace(/\n|([ ] )/g,"");//.replace(/" /g,"\"");
img.src = url;
result.value = url;
overlay.style.backgroundImage = "url('"+url+"')";

svg,img{
  border: 3px dashed black;
}
textarea{
width:50%;
height:300px;
vertical-align: top;
}
.wrapper{
  position: relative;
  display: inline-block;
}
#overlay{
  position:absolute;
  left:0;
  top:0;
  right:0;
  bottom:0;
  pointer-events: none;
  background-repeat: no-repeat;
  background-position: center left;
}
#my_input:focus + #overlay{
  display: none;
}

As SVG 


As IMG 


As Data URI 


As "Placeholder"