mathiasbynens/jquery-placeholder

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

3921 stars · 1300 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

A jQuery plugin that polyfills the HTML5 placeholder attribute for input and textarea elements in browsers without native support. It feature-detects native placeholder support, applies emulated behavior (including a styling class and correct .val() semantics) only where needed, and works down to IE6.

Use cases

• support placeholder text in old browsers like ie
• polyfill html5 placeholder attribute
• show placeholders in textarea for safari and opera
• add placeholder fallback to jquery forms
• make input values behave correctly while placeholder is showing
• style placeholder text consistently across browsers

When to choose

• you maintain a legacy site that must support IE6-9 or other browsers lacking native placeholder support
• your stack is already jQuery-based and you want a drop-in polyfill
• you need .val() to return an empty string while placeholder text is displayed, matching native behavior

When to avoid

• you only target modern browsers, which all support the placeholder attribute natively
• your project does not use jQuery (a vanilla polyfill would be lighter)
• you need actively developed software with new features or timely fixes

Facets

plugin · maturity maintenance

form-handling ui-components web-development frontend browser jquery-plugin polyfill html5-placeholder legacy-browser-support ie-compatibility form-inputs textareas

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="mathiasbynens/jquery-placeholder")