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This is the old way of doing it, which I've used quite a bit. The disadvantage is that the placeholder text disappears when you focus. I've found this to be annoying when the UI doesn't also include labels next to the input. Over the past several months I've started replacing this method with using placeholder text, which I think is a UX improvement.
– Redtopia
Commented Dec 10, 2013 at 19:31
5

The other problem with code like this is your serverside code has to deal with placeholder text as empty input, which has problems with edge cases where you want to enter a town called "Town". Instead of checking values against the placeholder text you should really use a data-modified flag on the input, and then clear the input on form submit if the flag is not set. And for AJAX interfaces you may not even have a form, so you should be able to associate an arbitrary submission event with the input. This is one of those really simple situations that isn't.
– Whelkaholism
Commented Mar 7, 2014 at 13:16

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