Can you have multiline HTML5 placeholder text in a <textarea>?

Question

For <textarea>s the spec specifically outlines that carriage returns + line breaks in the placeholder attribute MUST be rendered as linebreaks by the browser.

User agents should present this hint to the user when the element's value is the empty string and the control is not focused (e.g. by displaying it inside a blank unfocused control). All U+000D CARRIAGE RETURN U+000A LINE FEED character pairs (CRLF) in the hint, as well as all other U+000D CARRIAGE RETURN (CR) and U+000A LINE FEED (LF) characters in the hint, must be treated as line breaks when rendering the hint.

Also reflected on MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/textarea#attr-placeholder

FWIW, when I try on Chrome 63.0.3239.132, it does indeed work as it says it should.

On most (see details below) browsers, editing the placeholder in javascript allows multiline placeholder. As it has been said, it's not compliant with the specification and you shouldn't expect it to work in the future (edit: it does work).

This example replaces all multiline textarea's placeholder.

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

Array.prototype.forEach.call(textAreas, function(elem) {
    elem.placeholder = elem.placeholder.replace(/\\n/g, '\n');
});

<textarea class="textAreaMultiline" 
          placeholder="Hello, \nThis is multiline example \n\nHave Fun"
          rows="5" cols="35"></textarea>

_{JsFiddle snippet.}

Expected result

---

Based on comments it seems some browser accepts this hack and others don't.
This is the results of tests I ran (with browsertshots and browserstack)

• Chrome: >= 35.0.1916.69
• Firefox: >= 35.0 (results varies on platform)
• IE: >= 10
• KHTML based browsers: 4.8
• Safari: No (tested = Safari 8.0.6 Mac OS X 10.8)
• Opera: No (tested <= 15.0.1147.72)

Fused with theses statistics, this means that it works on about 88.7% of currently (Oct 2015) used browsers.

Update: Today, it works on at least 94.4% of currently (July 2018) used browsers.

I find that if you use a lot of spaces, the browser will wrap it properly. Don't worry about using an exact number of spaces, just throw a lot in there, and the browser should properly wrap to the first non space character on the next line.

<textarea name="address" placeholder="1313 Mockingbird Ln         Saginaw, MI 45100"></textarea>

There is actual a hack which makes it possible to add multiline placeholders in Webkit browsers, Chrome used to work but in more recent versions they removed it:

---

First add the first line of your placeholder to the html5 as usual

<textarea id="text1" placeholder="Line 1" rows="10"></textarea>

then add the rest of the line by css:

#text1::-webkit-input-placeholder::after {
    display:block;
    content:"Line 2\A Line 3";
}

---

If you want to keep your lines at one place you can try the following. The downside of this is that other browsers than chrome, safari, webkit-etc. don't even show the first line:

<textarea id="text2" placeholder="." rows="10"></textarea>​

then add the rest of the line by css:

#text2::-webkit-input-placeholder{
    color:transparent;
}

#text2::-webkit-input-placeholder::before {
    color:#666;
    content:"Line 1\A Line 2\A Line 3\A";
}

---

Demo Fiddle

It would be very great, if s.o. could get a similar demo working on Firefox.

According to MDN,

Carriage returns or line-feeds within the placeholder text must be treated as line breaks when rendering the hint.

This means that if you just jump to a new line, it should be rendered correctly. I.e.

<textarea placeholder="The car horn plays La Cucaracha.
You can choose your own color as long as it's black.
The GPS has the voice of Darth Vader.
"></textarea> 

should render like this: