title: jQuery not able to retrieve placeholder attribute value?
body: <p>Is there a jQuery way for me to retrieve the placeholder attribute of a form input element?  I've tried the obvious:</p>
  
  <pre><code>alert($('form_input_element').attr('placeholder'));
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>but it returns undefined in both firefox and chrome for some reason!  <strong>All other attributes are displayed fine with the above code</strong>...  is this a bug in jQuery?  using the latest version.  Is there a workaround?</p>
  
  <p><strong><em>UPDATE</em></strong>: Ok, very surprisingly another jQuery plugin was actually REMOVING the placeholder attributes on all input elements...  That's why I was getting undefineds.</p>