HTML5 placeholder disappears on focus

Stefano J. Attardi wrote a nice jQuery plugin that just does that.
It is more stable than Robert's and also fades to a lighter grey when the field gets focused.

• See the demo page
• Grab it on GitHub
• Play with the fiddle

---

I modified his plugin to read placeholder attribute as opposed to manually creating a span.
This fiddle has complete code:

HTML

<input type="text" placeholder="Hello, world!">

JS

// Original code by Stefano J. Attardi, MIT license

(function($) {
    function toggleLabel() {
        var input = $(this);

        if (!input.parent().hasClass('placeholder')) {
            var label = $('<label>').addClass('placeholder');
            input.wrap(label);

            var span = $('<span>');
            span.text(input.attr('placeholder'))
            input.removeAttr('placeholder');
            span.insertBefore(input);
        }

        setTimeout(function() {
            var def = input.attr('title');
            if (!input.val() || (input.val() == def)) {
                input.prev('span').css('visibility', '');
                if (def) {
                    var dummy = $('<label></label>').text(def).css('visibility','hidden').appendTo('body');
                    input.prev('span').css('margin-left', dummy.width() + 3 + 'px');
                    dummy.remove();
                }
            } else {
                input.prev('span').css('visibility', 'hidden');
            }
        }, 0);
    };

    function resetField() {
        var def = $(this).attr('title');
        if (!$(this).val() || ($(this).val() == def)) {
            $(this).val(def);
            $(this).prev('span').css('visibility', '');
        }
    };

    var fields = $('input, textarea');

    fields.live('mouseup', toggleLabel); // needed for IE reset icon [X]
    fields.live('keydown', toggleLabel);
    fields.live('paste', toggleLabel);
    fields.live('focusin', function() {
        $(this).prev('span').css('color', '#ccc');
    });
    fields.live('focusout', function() {
        $(this).prev('span').css('color', '#999');
    });

    $(function() {
       $('input[placeholder], textarea[placeholder]').each(
           function() { toggleLabel.call(this); }
       );
    });

})(jQuery);

CSS

.placeholder {
  background: white;
  float: left;
  clear: both;
}
.placeholder span {
  position: absolute;
  padding: 5px;
  margin-left: 3px;
  color: #999;
}
.placeholder input, .placeholder textarea {
  position: relative;
  margin: 0;
  border-width: 1px;
  padding: 6px;
  background: transparent;
  font: inherit;
}

/* Hack to remove Safari's extra padding. Remove if you don't care about pixel-perfection. */
@media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:0) {
    .placeholder input, .placeholder textarea { padding: 4px; }
}

Robert Nyman discusses the problem and documents his approach in his blog.
This fiddle that has all the neccessary HTML, CSS and JS.

Unfortunately, he solves the problem by changing value.
This will not work by definition if placeholder text is itself a valid input.