Question

When I begin writing text in the textarea, I want the outer div, with a class box, to have its border turned solid instead of dashed, but somehow the :focus doesn’t apply in this case. If it works with :active, how come it doesn’t work with :focus?

Any ideas why?

(Note. I want the DIV’s border to turn solid, NOT the textareas)

div.box
{
    width: 300px;
    height: 300px;
    border: thin dashed black;
}

div.box:focus{
    border: thin solid black;
}

<div class="box">
    <textarea rows="10" cols="25"></textarea>
</div>

Answer 1

While this can’t be achieved with CSS/HTML alone, it can be achieved with JavaScript (without need of a library):

var textareas = document.getElementsByTagName('textarea');

for (i=0;i<textareas.length;i++){
    // you can omit the 'if' if you want to style the parent node regardless of its
    // element type
    if (textareas[i].parentNode.tagName.toString().toLowerCase() == 'div') {
        textareas[i].onfocus = function(){
            this.parentNode.style.borderStyle = 'solid';
        }
        textareas[i].onblur = function(){
            this.parentNode.style.borderStyle = 'dashed';
        }
    }
}

JS Fiddle demo.

Incidentally, with a library, such as jQuery, the above could be condensed down to:

$('textarea').focus(
    function(){
        $(this).parent('div').css('border-style','solid');
    }).blur(
    function(){
        $(this).parent('div').css('border-style','dashed');
    });

JS Fiddle demo.

References:

• getElementsByTagName().
• onfocus.
• onblur.
• parentNode.
• tagName.
• toString().
• toLowerCase().
• style.
• focus().
• blur().
• parent().
• css().