Hopefully you’ve already read Jackson Fox’s post on Making Infield Form Labels Suck Less from a UX perspective. If you haven’t, I recommend that you check it out before reading my thoughts from the front-end development perspective.
Can't wait to check out the code? Head down to the jsFiddle at the end of the post.
So often in web design and development, things that are easy to implement aren’t appropriately examined. In this case, placing the label for a text field within the field is a common practice to make form layouts more compact. The implications of that choice create interaction and technical challenges that need to be considered carefully.
Since Jackson covered usability issues with this approach, I want to discuss some of the technical and accessibility considerations. Trevor covered this a few years ago, and while the browser landscape has changed quite a bit, it’s still a good read on the subject. My issue with the popular techniques is more semantic than technical. There are a bunch of ways to get text into a text field to serve as a label, but most of these techniques only solve it visually. Let’s take a look at the two most popular.



