Style Your Website's Search Field with JS/CSS

search

Continuing to provide unobtrusive solutions, CSSG is happy to present SearchField. It serves as a way to style your search field and add behavior without any additional JavaScript or modifications in your markup. It features plug & play onfocus and onblur behaviors and auto suggestion like you've never seen before :)
Again, all you need is two lines of code, links to JavaScript and CSS files and that would be it.

Take a look at the Demo | Download SearchField

Features

SearchField features 3 states for search input field based on user's actions. We have inactive state, on click state (on focus to be exact) and inactive with user inputted text. You've seen these features on many sites but the difference here is that all you need to do is provide id to your search field, script takes it from there.
Additional feature, that can be turned on and off, is a search suggestion terms displayed as a dropdown box below the search field. You can navigate with up and down keys, or your mouse and you can edit your own keywords. Again, there is a difference between this and other suggestion or autocomplete scripts. With SearchField you don't have to worry about additional markup or id's for dropdown list, it is generated automatically.

Implementation

Download the script, extract the files and place the folder named "searchfield" in the root of your site. Add these two lines of code inside your head tag.


Now, all you need inside the markup is a search input field with exact id as named in .js file. Default id is "searchfield" but you can use anything.
Important thing is the parent element of the search field. I suggest using

tag as a parrent element. Here's how original form looks like, so you can use something similar.




At the end modify css file to make it blend into your site.

Files

There are 2 main files, searchfield.js file and searchfield.css. Inside the .js file you can edit 4 parameters and get the results you want. The appearance of your field and dropdown suggestion box is modified via .css file. The class names are commented so you'll find your way around it pretty well.

Parameters

Inside the searchfield.js we have 4 parameters: id, defaultText, suggestion, suggestionText.
First one represents id of the search field you want to add this script to. You can use your own id just make sure that it matches the search field in your html file. defaultText is a text that your search field will use as default value. When you set suggestion=true the script will generate search suggestions list for search field based on content of variable called suggestionText. If you don't want suggestion list to appear set suggestion=false.

Preview and Download

Take a look at the Demo

Download SearchField

Note: since Safari has it's own behaviors for input elements this script is disabled for that browser.