Copyright (c) 2010-The End of Time, Mike Taylor, http://miketaylr.com
MIT Licensed: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
Enables cross-browser html5 placeholder for inputs, by first testing for a native implementation before building one. Special thanks to Ben Alman (http://benalman.com/) for suggesting a number of improvements.
The general strategy is one of adding a "position: absolute" label on top of the input element.
Firefox pre-filling input items causes issues. A possible workaround is to also set autocomplete=false on the input element(s) in question, if this makes user experience sense to do so (e.g. perhaps on a search box, but not the username field).
$('input[placeholder]').placeholder();
$('input[placeholder]').placeholder({ color: '#bada55' });
<input type="text" placeholder="username">