Site Search

Can you fix the site search at the top of all the pages. HTML 5 has a feature similar to the Prompt in an edit box in Android, but the search box appears to be using normal text or some non-standard way of showing the word 'search'. I'm not sure why the word is even needed, but probably 10 times a day I go to search and whatever method is used to clear it fails and the word 'search' ends up prefixing what I type. Sometimes it appears to prefix after I hit enter too and the word search isn't there as I'm typing then magically appears. It is very annoying to have to type things 2-3 times and then it even adds it to the list Firefox maintains for previous entries and I have to delete it from there so it doesn't suggest it.

Which version are you using? I'm working mostly with FireFox and it does work properly here.

Firefox 15 and it did it in the previous version 14. From what I can tell the box isn't assigned it in HTML, so it must be Javascript doing it. Try removing whatever is setting it in Javascript and use the placeholder attribute in the input tag instead.

I will check it. Seems like it isn't supported by Internet Explorer.

Works fine in FF15 and Chrome21 here.

Tested further and it is indeed the Javascript causing it. It is because it runs when the page finishes loading. It doesn't take into account that something may already be in the box, the focus may already be there and about to type, or the user just clicked the box at the same time that it set the field to Search and it didn't grab the focus event yet to clear search out.

For the record...I no longer determine my webpages by what works with IE. Most of the time something doesn't work with IE or M$ has some non-standard way of doing things. I don't even use Chrome as a "standard" anymore due to some perfectly valid HTML I have not working in it. Opera has the best support for HTML5 and HTML5 controls followed by a close 2nd with Firefox which other than extreme memory usage and some issues painting table borders is my favorite browser. I still have a lot of issues in general with this site on large screens (On all browsers)- It only uses up 60-70% of the width and whatever is setting the static width makes all the menus open up offset to the right. Customizing doesn't always improve a UI...sometimes it just needs to be kept simple. One reason the placeholder attribute was added to the input tag was because the Javascript hack to do the same thing causes issues like this. Setting focus on page load was another thing that drove users nuts and they added attributes for that too. If M$ doesn't support it in IE8+ either they need to get on the ball or their users need to upgrade to a better browser.