Html5 Placeholders with .NET MVC 3 Razor EditorFor extension?

You may take a look at the following article for writing a custom DataAnnotationsModelMetadataProvider.

And here's another, more ASP.NET MVC 3ish way to proceed involving the newly introduced IMetadataAware interface.

Start by creating a custom attribute implementing this interface:

public class PlaceHolderAttribute : Attribute, IMetadataAware
{
    private readonly string _placeholder;
    public PlaceHolderAttribute(string placeholder)
    {
        _placeholder = placeholder;
    }

    public void OnMetadataCreated(ModelMetadata metadata)
    {
        metadata.AdditionalValues["placeholder"] = _placeholder;
    }
}

And then decorate your model with it:

public class MyViewModel
{
    [PlaceHolder("Enter title here")]
    public string Title { get; set; }
}

Next define a controller:

public class HomeController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        return View(new MyViewModel());
    }
}

A corresponding view:

@model MyViewModel
@using (Html.BeginForm())
{
    @Html.EditorFor(x => x.Title)
    <input type="submit" value="OK" />
}

And finally the editor template (~/Views/Shared/EditorTemplates/string.cshtml):

@{
    var placeholder = string.Empty;
    if (ViewData.ModelMetadata.AdditionalValues.ContainsKey("placeholder"))
    {
        placeholder = ViewData.ModelMetadata.AdditionalValues["placeholder"] as string;
    }
}
<span>
    @Html.Label(ViewData.ModelMetadata.PropertyName)
    @Html.TextBox("", ViewData.TemplateInfo.FormattedModelValue, new { placeholder = placeholder })
</span>

As smnbss comments in Darin Dimitrov's answer, Prompt exists for exactly this purpose, so there is no need to create a custom attribute. From the the documentation:

Gets or sets a value that will be used to set the watermark for prompts in the UI.

To use it, just decorate your view model's property like so:

[Display(Prompt = "numbers only")]
public int Age { get; set; }

This text is then conveniently placed in ModelMetadata.Watermark. Out of the box, the default template in MVC 3 ignores the Watermark property, but making it work is really simple. All you need to do is tweaking the default string template, to tell MVC how to render it. Just edit String.cshtml, like Darin does, except that rather than getting the watermark from ModelMetadata.AdditionalValues, you get it straight from ModelMetadata.Watermark:

~/Views/Shared/EditorTemplates/String.cshtml:

@Html.TextBox("", ViewData.TemplateInfo.FormattedModelValue, new { @class = "text-box single-line", placeholder = ViewData.ModelMetadata.Watermark })

And that is it.

As you can see, the key to make everything work is the placeholder = ViewData.ModelMetadata.Watermark bit.

If you also want to enable watermarking for multi-line textboxes (textareas), you do the same for MultilineText.cshtml:

~/Views/Shared/EditorTemplates/MultilineText.cshtml:

@Html.TextArea("", ViewData.TemplateInfo.FormattedModelValue.ToString(), 0, 0, new { @class = "text-box multi-line", placeholder = ViewData.ModelMetadata.Watermark })