btw, for jQuery users, this is the difference between calling ``$element.attr('value')`` (HTML attribute) vs ``$element.prop('value')``.

In WebDriver, some other attributes are affected like this, ``selected`` and ``disabled`` for instance which return booleans (more exactly the string ``true`` for the PHP WebDriver library because of a crappy decoding of the returned value).
This is why our implementation of ``getAttribute`` in Selenium2Driver uses JS to get the HTML attribute itself.