CSS selector for text input fields?

input[type=text]

or, to restrict to text inputs inside forms

form input[type=text]

or, to restrict further to a certain form, assuming it has id myForm

#myForm input[type=text]

Notice: This is not supported by IE6, so if you want to develop for IE6 either use IE7.js (as Yi Jiang suggested) or start adding classes to all your text inputs.

Reference: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/selector.html#attribute-selectors

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Because it is specified that default attribute values may not always be selectable with attribute selectors, one could try to cover other cases of markup for which text inputs are rendered:

input:not([type]), /* type attribute not present in markup */
input[type=""],    /* type attribute present, but empty    */
input[type=text]   /* type is explicitly defined as 'text' */

Still this leaves the case when the type is defined, but has an invalid value and that still falls back to type="text". To cover that we could use select all inputs that are not one of the other known types

input:not([type=button]):not([type=password]):not([type=submit])...

But this selector would be quite ridiculous and also the list of possible types is growing with new features being added to HTML.

Notice: the :not pseudo-class is only supported starting with IE9.

I usually use selectors in my main stylesheet, then make an ie6 specific .js (jquery) file that adds a class to all of the input types. Example:

$(document).ready(function(){
  $("input[type='text']").addClass('text');
)};

And then just duplicate my styles in the ie6 specific stylesheet using the classes. That way the actual markup is a little bit cleaner.

You can use the attribute selector here:

input[type="text"] {
    font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
}

This is supported in IE7 and above. You can use IE7.js to add support for this if you need to support IE6.

See: http://reference.sitepoint.com/css/attributeselector for more information