HTML5 textarea placeholder not appearing

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This one has always been a gotcha for me and many others. In short, the opening and closing tags for the <textarea> element must be on the same line, otherwise a newline character occupies it. The placeholder will therefore not be displayed since the input area contains content (a newline character is, technically, valid content).

Good:

<textarea></textarea>

Bad:

<textarea>
</textarea>

Update (2020)

This is not true anymore, according to the HTML5 parsing spec:

If the next token is a U+000A LINE FEED (LF) character token, 
then ignore that token and move on to the next one. (Newlines 
at the start of textarea elements are ignored as an authoring 
convenience.)

You might still have trouble if you editor insists on ending lines with CRLF, though.

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