Recipe 5.2 Setting Styles for textarea Elements

Problem

You want to set styles for textarea elements in a web form to change the text's color , size , weight, and other properties of the element, as in Figure 5-4.

Figure 5-4. A textarea element with styles applied

Solution

Use a type selector to associate styles with textarea elements:

 textarea {  width: 300px;  height: 100px;  background-color: yellow;  font-size: 1em;  font-weight: bold;  font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;  border: 1px solid black; } 

Discussion

Associating styles to textarea elements is fairly straightforward through the use of a type selector:

 textarea {  background-color: blue; } 

By adding the :focus pseudo-class, you can change the style of the active textarea field:

 textarea:focus {  background-color: green; } 

So, as a user fills out a form, the textarea field he is currently filling out will change color.

The browsers that currently support :focus are Netscape Navigator 6+ and Opera 7.

See Also

The CSS 2.1 specification for dynamic pseudo-classes at http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/selector.html#x33; the CSS 2.1 specification for attribute selectors at http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/selector.html#attribute-selectors.