Fancy Input - CSS3 text typing effects for input fields

As an interaction designer, I implore you: do NOT screw around with forms. Your conversion rates will fall through the floor. The CSS specification itself says that browsers can ignore styling for forms. This is by design. Overriding it with a bunch of unsupported animated nonsense that requires Javascript and invisible divs and such is a recipe for disaster from a usability and accessibility stand point.

So many paternalistic comments here telling us to please not use this. As if it was not obvious enough this fancy input is properly useless, and very interesting in its uselessness, as an experiment or an exercice de style.

Usefulness is overrated. Would no human ever had followed the craze of useless endeavors, we would still all be living in caves, and would not even draw with fingers on theirs walls.

Please use this never on mobile. The experience is impossible on android, and as seen from the rest of the comments on iOS it's not much better...

On desktop it's super cool though. Kudo's!

Please do not use this.

The whole page flashes and flickers for me on Safari 6.0.2 on Mac OS X 10.8.2.

Input of extended characters also doesn't work. Option-[aeiou] doesn't enter any characters. Holding [aeiou] prints the base character but fails to update once a modifier is selected.

The antialising algorithm alternates between subpixel and greyscale, causing flickering changes to the boldness of the text.

All in all, very very broken.

Bug report: I managed to get it into a state where it's impossible to delete the characters behind the cursor. I remember pressing the Euro sign (alt-gr + 4) and accidentally hitting the 'Windows' key. Here's a dump of the DOM state: http://pastebin.com/ELyMNAKd

Cool, but please don't use this. It is essentially unusable on my iPad. Virtual keyboards tend to choke on such fanciness. If you want my input, make it easier, not harder for me.

Ugh. When I select text, the selected text does not appear in the same location as the corresponding unselected text, the cursor doesn't line up with the selected text, and the cursor moves to incorrect locations in the text as I move it with shift-arrows.

Pretty. But whenever I see something like this on a website, I disable styles. As easy as Ctrl-Alt-Z on my browser.

I do it for blogs that have fancy title css, scripted comments... just about for anything that's unnessesary junk and therefore just a pretty annoyance.

It's certainly "fancy", but... as someone who has been forced to go down this road more than a few times for desktop and mobile platforms please do NOT encourage this. The level of manipulation and monitoring of key events necessary to get even close to parity of normal input behavior and accessibility, which this example unfortunately doesn't do very well, is enough to drive one into voluntary retirement.

It's fun to look at and play with, and I know it has some useful applications, but it quickly becomes incredibly fragile and is guaranteed to waste time and effort that can, and should, be spent on other stuff. Unless of course there is nothing left to do and you're just looking for ways to torture some poor soul hopped up on Red Bull or Mountain Dew.

That said, I definitely do encourage anyone interested to explore how this stuff works. My experience has been that design pretty much overlooks input behavior in general, but there are some pretty impressive things that can be done now without painting yourself into a corner and exploring stuff like this is probably one of the fastest ways to figure out where the boundaries are.

The number of bug reports in my opinion sums up the problem with doing this thing. Even though these effects can be really neat, there is nothing worse than somebody trying to put in data and have the form not accept thier input for an unknown reason.

That being said, I think these could be really neat in certain places and maybe with a bit more testing this could be super useful.

Dead keys seem to confuse it, though. They get added to the value of the input element, but they aren't displayed.

This is cool, just don't press tab.

Cute, but if I were a user and I saw a form that uses this, I would probably close the tab.

Looks great! A few bugs, and probably many usability and compatibility issues, but I can see something like this finding its way into a movie or game website. Too flashy for a regular form input, but in the right context it would feel at home.

Clicking the input box when it's typing "type something..." is causing a crash for me. Also, I broke it by hitting home and then spamming the left arrow key. :)

Chrome 27.0.1423.0 dev-m

Really nice! Some things are broken on my iPhone, like the spacing when deleting and typing letters when they overflow the input area

FYI: Switching to an IME to enter Japanese (or any other language, I imagine) breaks it and doesn't allow typing. Switching back to English doesn't fix it. Putting the cursor at the beginning again allowed me to type English, but I can no longer type at the end.

Aside the dizzy collateral effects you get after writing more than 10 words, when you try to write accented words in other languages it stops working.

With measure, and applying it wisely, this can be a good thing. But for long texts, it's a madness.

Very cool effects but pretty jittery and laggy when typing fast on chrome 24, too bad.

Tried it on Chrome. Non-english characters look awful - fonts are mess, typing effects work randomly. Sometimes all I'm typing is invisible. For me it's unusable.

I'm not an advanced user of jQuery, but still feel slightly ashamed for asking:

How can I use effect2 without having to change/toggle the class (i.e. effect2 class onPageLoad)??

I like this! It has potential to be used in really nice ways. Once the kinks have been worked out, I would definitely consider using this.

Bug: ctrl-a (or ctrl-anything) results in the non-ctlr key stuck in the text field with no way to delete it

If I select 'textarea' it only wraps by letter not by complete word.

I thought someone might want to know.

File this under "One of those things that can be done but never should be."

It creates a lot of extra DOM nodes, not that great to be honest for this effect.

typing more than 5 letters made be feel i was going to have a seizure.

also, the demo is lacking in basic usuability-- at least have the form reselected automatically when you change between effects.

I never had reasons for animosity against CSS, but now I do.

Works great on Chrome, causes weird flashes on Safari.

Stops working if you type an accent character ´

Gives me a headache.

Not working on IE9

broke it within 10 seconds