Recipe 7.4. 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 shown in Figure 7-5.

Figure 7-5. 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 Safari, Netscape Navigator 6+, Firefox, 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.