joefiorini/jquery-placeholder — comment on commit 76b412809dc86b9bff1b9a37d6397da5d9cef40a
File:  line 0
By stevemayhew:

The val() function is a jQuery pluggin (as I'm sure you are aware). What it does for text/password/textfield is simply return element.value, or if called with arguments, it does element.value = the argument.

the valHooks are get/set methods, keyed by tagName (lowercase) that it optionally calls to get or set values of form elements (eg select/option is complex enough to need such a thing).

I'm planning to add a get hook for text / textarea that return's empty string if the element is in placeholder state.

Please help me test, as IMHO, this is a better approach to this rather then the wack-a-mole route.