Changing font colour in Textboxes in IE which are disabled

Question

I noticed that you can change the colour of text in textboxes which are disabled in Firefox applying a simple class but could not get a way to do it in IE 6/7. Does anyone out there have a elegant solution to achieve this.

Answer 1

I noticed that you can change the colour of text in textboxes which are disabled in Firefox

I think what the question is trying to say is that this:

<textarea disabled="disabled" style="color: red;">Hello</textarea> 

Results in grey text in IE, vs. red in Fox. FWIW, Opera also gives grey, whilst the WebKit browsers give red.

This is a pure CSS issue to do with how much form fields are rendered according to the OS's widget set and how much according to the CSS rules. This has always been an area of great cross-browser difference. Scripting is not relevant, much though SO would like “use jQuery” to be the answer to every question.

The usual workaround is to use ‘readonly’ instead of ‘disabled’, then use styling (eg. based off ‘class="disabled"’) to reproduce whatever shaded disabled effect you want. ‘readonly’ controls are not turned into OS-level-disabled widgets, giving you more latitude to style them.