making a textbox uneditable

[martinjsmith]

Hi there,

Anyone know how to make a standard HTML textbox uneditable i.e. the text in it cannot be deleted or amended?

Martin

[Zvona]

Standard :
<input type="text" readonly="readonly" onfocus="this.blur();" />

If you want to disable(gray) text-box :
<input type="text" disabled="disabled" />

[beetle]

Zvona, I've never seen it done that way. Interesting.
You should be able to just add the readonly attribute

<input type="text" readonly>

As far as I know, this is standard.

[boxer_1]

Originally posted by beetle
Zvona, I've never seen it done that way. Interesting.
You should be able to just add the readonly attribute

<input type="text" readonly>

As far as I know, this is standard.

Some older browser versions don't support the standard way of disabling a form field. onFocus="this.blur();" pretty much takes care of that by removing focus from the form field as soon as it is applied, preventing the value from being changed ;).

[beetle]

I meant the readonly="readonly" part....I'm pretty (or was) sure that readonly is boolean, and shouldn't need to receive a string value like that.

I'm very familiar with the blur() method :D

[boxer_1]

Originally posted by beetle
I meant the readonly="readonly" part....I'm pretty (or was) sure that readonly is boolean, and shouldn't need to receive a string value like that.

I'm very familiar with the blur() method :D

Oh, I thought you were talking about the onFocus="this.blur();"...sorry. Yes, the readonly can simply be given a true or false value :).

http://www.mozilla.org/xpfe/xulref/textbox.html

[beetle]

So isn't it technically invalid to use readonly="readonly"?? That's what I'm trying to get at....

[Roy Sinclair]

Originally posted by beetle
So isn't it technically invalid to use readonly="readonly"?? That's what I'm trying to get at....

As of xHTML 1.0 <input... readonly="readonly"> is technically valid and <input... readonly> isn't valid though browsers do accept it.

See http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#h-4.5

[beetle]

Ya, but what if you aren't using an XHTML DOCTYPE, or no DOCTYPE at all? (which, correct me if I'm wrong, most people still do unless they are concerned with XHTML)

BTW...thanks for the link.

[Roy Sinclair]

Originally posted by beetle
Ya, but what if you aren't using an XHTML DOCTYPE, or no DOCTYPE at all? (which, correct me if I'm wrong, most people still do unless they are concerned with XHTML)

BTW...thanks for the link.

readonly="readonly" works in any browser which accepts the readonly property in the first place (at least every browser I know).

[boxer_1]

http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-xforms-20010608/index-all.html See 5.2.3 readOnly (use Ctrl F to find quickly). Not exceptionally useful, but worth a mention ;).

[adios]

readonly="readonly"
selected="selected"
disabled="disabled"

http://www.webreview.com/tag/2000/09_01_00.shtml

Also:

<input....onfocus="if(this.readOnly==null)this.blur()">

...unless you want it to run everywhere. It generally produces a bit of a flicker, although it works well enough.

[Zvona]

These aren't valid :
readonly="true"
disabled="false"

These are valid in HTML DTD:
readonly
disabled

Above is called attribute minimalization, which isn't allowed in XHTML nor XML declarations. Thus, they've replaced them with :
readonly="readonly"
disabled="disabled"

However, you can alter attributes through scripting :
document.frmName.elemName.readonly = true;
document.frmName.elemName.disabled = false;

[beetle]

Thanks for all the great info people!