How can I apply a background image to a text input without losing the default border in Firefox and WebKit browsers?
When you change border or background style on text inputs They revert back to the very basic rendering mode. Text inputs that are os-style are usually overlays (like flash is) which are rendered on top of the document.
I do not believe there is a pure CSS fix to your problem. Best thing to do - in my opinion - is to pick a style that you like and emulate it with CSS. So that no matter what browser you're in, the inputs will look the same. You can still have hover effects and the like. OS X style glow effects might be tricky, but I'm sure it is doable.
@Alex Morales: Your solution is redundant. border: 0; is ignored in favor of border: 1px solid #abadb3; and results in unnecessary bytes transferred across the wire.
This is the CSS that I use that can provide the default look back:
input, select, textarea {
border-top: 1px #acaeb4 solid;
border-left: 1px #dde1e7 solid;
border-right: 1px #dde1e7 solid;
border-bottom: 2px #f1f4f7 solid;
-moz-border-radius: 2px;
-webkit-border-radius: 2px;
}
You could also apply :active and give the controls that blueish hue once they're selected.
Update!
Ok, here is a workaround that I think is cross-browser compatible. The only issue would be that the default style differs by a few pixels so this might need some tweaking.
<html>
<head>
<style>
.pictureInput {
text-indent: 20px;
}
.input-wrapper {
position:relative;
}
.img-wrapper {
position:absolute;
top:2px;
left:2px;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<div class="input-wrapper">
<div class="img-wrapper"><img src="http://storage.conduit.com/images/searchengines/search_icon.gif" alt="asddasd" /></div>
<input type="text" class="pictureInput" />
</div>
<br />
<br />
<input type="text">
</body>
</html>
By using absolute-relative positioning you can make the absolute div (containing the image) act absolute in relation to its parent which all browsers I know about (not counting sub-IE6 versions, IE6+ are fine) can handle. User scaling might be an issue, but this is how it is with workarounds.
On the upside, you don't have to change the styles on your inputs at all (except for text-indent, but you'd do that anyway I hope).
On the downside, it's not the prettiest workaround.
Old!
I know this is not what you want, but you could do something like this to at least make all the input borders consistent.
input {
border-color:#aaa;
border-width:1px;
}
I haven't tried it in all browsers, but since you aren't setting the border-style it might use the native style but with another size (though you can skip that too). I think the key is to just set the border-color to something so that all input fields will use the same border-color and leave the rest up to the browser.