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mathiasbynens/jquery-placeholder
A jQuery plugin that enables HTML5 placeholder behavior for browsers that aren’t trying hard enough yet
A jQuery plugin that polyfills the HTML5 placeholder attribute for browsers that didn't support it natively. It's for legacy jQuery codebases that needed placeholder text to work in old IE and Safari; for anything built in the last decade-plus, native placeholder support makes this plugin unnecessary.
Handles the tricky password-input case (browsers needing a fake text input to simulate placeholder on type=password) without creating duplicate DOM IDs, so labels still bind correctly. Feature detection results are cached on jQuery.fn.placeholder.input/.textarea so you can reuse the check elsewhere instead of re-testing. .val() behavior mirrors native placeholder semantics exactly (empty string when showing placeholder, re-shows on clearing), which avoids a common polyfill footgun.
The entire premise is obsolete — placeholder has been natively supported in every relevant browser since roughly 2013, so this only matters if you're stuck supporting IE6-era targets. No commits or releases since 2020, and it was already legacy tech before that given jQuery's decline. Known bug where input type=reset breaks the plugin is documented in the README rather than fixed. Ships as a jQuery plugin depending on Bower for install, both of which are dead ecosystems themselves — adopting this now means pulling in two obsolete dependencies to fix a problem modern browsers don't have.