Use the html5 placeholder attribute now

Until the html5 placeholder attribute works on Gecko or IE browsers, you can use this following jQuery code.

Tue Oct 19 2010

// jQuery code
var i = document.createElement("input");

// Only bind if placeholder isn't natively supported by the browser
if (!("placeholder" in i)) {
  $("input[placeholder]").each(function () {
    var self = $(this);
    self.val(self.attr("placeholder")).bind({
      focus: function () {
        if (self.val() === self.attr("placeholder")) {
          self.val("");
        }
      },
      blur: function () {
        var label = self.attr("placeholder");
        if (label && self.val() === "") {
          self.val(label);
        }
      }
    });
  });
}

<!-- html5 -->
<input type="text" name="search" placeholder="Search" value="">
Detection method is picked up from diveintohtml5.org