Absolute Positioned Textarea Text Not Appearing

September 15, 2015
Reading Time: 1 minute

I’ve been doing a LOT of CSS with my projects as of late, mainly with SASS and LESS, but that isn’t related to this issue.

In creating a popover textarea entry directive, I got all of the CSS in place and then noticed that for whatever reason the textarea wasn’t showing any text that I entered into it.

It would appear if I toggled any of the CSS properties in the Chrome Dev Tools, however, my issue remained. If I removed the position absolute, it would work. I was clueless as to what would resolve this, but at least I could see changes when modifying stuff.

And then I noticed, I had wrapped the outermost tags for the directive in <span> tags like this:

When I set the <span> tags to <div> tags, voila, everything worked as I had intended. After looking into it further, I realized that the span tags only should be used for inline-level components, and I was using <div> elements inside of the <span> tags, which are block-level elements. As a result, the <span> tag breaks the html in that it doesn’t allow block-level children.

So if you run into an issue like this, check the surrounding tags. Here’s a W3C detail on the span tag for those interested in further technicals: http://www.w3.org/TR/html51/semantics.html#the-span-element

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *