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Why wouldn't you use the placeholder, attribute, then detect support, then use a fallback if needed... Something like:

function hasPlaceholder() { var input = document.createElement('input'); return ('placeholder' in input); }

should do the job to detect support.

Was thinking the exact same thing - placeHolder support is native with HTML5 spec - so better to utilize the 'future' and rollback for IE<9

thanks for the info. I created this for my project. It worked, so I open sourced this small chunk of code.

In HTML5 way, I need to do it first and then have to write a fallback mechanism. Kinda too long for me :) Instead, I chose what works perfectly now.

Not sure why... in-field labels are a better approach. http://bit.ly/r4vVAa Plus the placeholder attribute is the long term.

What if I want my password field to say 'password', and on focus to be obscured with dots?

Helptext.js