paper-dropdown-menu should support floating labels like paper-input

[0x24a537r9]

I've got a form (see below) with a number of paper-input fields and one paper-dropdown-menu. It looks really buggy and out of place without a label when a value is selected. It's really kind of odd that, once you select a value, the label entirely disappears, leaving the user with no sense of what the field actually represents.

Imagine a scenario where I had two paper-dropdown-menus next to each other with the same set of values (a completely reasonable scenario, say, two dropdowns for current country of residence and country of birth); if they had values you'd have no idea which was which and no way to find out (since you can't undo a selection). That's a pretty significant UI failure.

Instead, the paper-dropdown-menu should support a floating label, much as the does (see the "Floating label" field of https://www.polymer-project.org/components/paper-input/demo.html).

[fballiano]

+1 for this one

[adedip]

+1 for me too!

[dani-gallegos]

+1 for me too!

[zenorocha]

+1

[Arduinology]

+1

[krisnye]

Agreed.

[bostondevin]

+1 - one of the first things I tried to do and couldn't!

[chrisconover]

Super excited to see that Yvonne has started working on this!

[Arduinology]

Agreed, thanks for taking this on @morethanreal .

[StephanBeutel]

+1 Perfect idea. Please implement this feature.

[mbergeron]

+1

[grimen]

+1

[o-m-a-t-a]

+1

[wuxiaoying]

if anyone's interested I did a rough version of it to use in my app. https://github.com/wuxiaoying/paper-dropdown-menu-ex , http://wuxiaoying.github.io/paper-dropdown-menu-ex/. It doesn't support everything, but i might work on it some more later :).

[o-m-a-t-a]

it seems like very useful. thanks wuxiaoying!

[grimen]

@wuxiaoying Just tested it - works and looks great, thanks!

[Sinjins]

+1 for me too. Looking forward to this update, and super glad to see @morethanreal has taken it on.

[sanmadjack]

This part of the material design spec clearly shows some floating labels:

http://www.google.com/design/spec/components/text-fields.html#text-fields-single-line-text-field

+1

[grokys]

+1 oh yes!

[chrisabovo]

+1

[nebojsa-simic]

+1

[gertcuykens]

+1

[attilapeter]

+1

[dgtlife]

+1 I guess I'll have to try and hack this in the meantime.