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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T03:21:53+00:00

I have ghost text in textfields that disappear when you focus on them using

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I have ghost text in textfields that disappear when you focus on them using HTML5’s placeholder attribute:

<input type="text" name="email" placeholder="Enter email"/>

I want to use that same mechanism to have multiline placeholder text in a textarea, maybe something like this:

<textarea name="story" placeholder="Enter story\n next line\n more"></textarea>

But those \ns show up in the text and don’t cause newlines… Is there a way to have a multiline placeholder?

UPDATE: The only way I got this to work was utilizing the jQuery Watermark plugin, which accepts HTML in the placeholder text:

$('.textarea_class').watermark('Enter story<br/> * newline', {fallback: false});
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    For <textarea>s the spec specifically outlines that carriage returns + line breaks in the placeholder attribute MUST be rendered as linebreaks by the browser.

    User agents should present this hint to the user when the element’s value is the empty string and the control is not focused (e.g. by displaying it inside a blank unfocused control). All U+000D CARRIAGE RETURN U+000A LINE FEED character pairs (CRLF) in the hint, as well as all other U+000D CARRIAGE RETURN (CR) and U+000A LINE FEED (LF) characters in the hint, must be treated as line breaks when rendering the hint.

    Also reflected on MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/textarea#attr-placeholder

    FWIW, when I try on Chrome 63.0.3239.132, it does indeed work as it says it should.

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