 ive been seeing the trend of applying inline labels on form elements more and more these days so i definitely needed to come up with a solid solution that would help me easily apply this effect maybe i need to explain a little better what i am referring to instead of using a label that is next to or above the input element the label is actually within the input then when the input is focused the label goes away and you can enter your value into it finally when the input is no longer focused if there is no value entered the inline label is then added back in see demo my solution the title attribute its so simple but perfect a great benefit of using the title attribute is that when you hover over the input you get a little tooltip displaying the inline label so all i need to do is add a title attribute with the text that we want to have show up as the inline label then we just use a little jquery to make it all happen the jquery first we want to select each input that has a title attribute once the document is loaded $ document ready function $ input title each function hellip next if the value of the input element is empty we want to take the title attribute and add it as the value of the input $ document ready function $ input title each function if $ this val === $ this val $ this attr title after that we want to setup a function that will fire once the input is focused when it is focused if the value is equal to the title attribute we want to set the value to nothing and add a class of focused $ document ready function $ input title each function if $ this val === $ this val $ this attr title $ this focus function if $ this val === $ this attr title $ this val addclass focused the reason why we add the class of focused is so that we can change the text color border or anything to make it noticeable that the input is being focused you can see this effect in the demo finally we want to add a function that will fire when the input loses focus when it does if the input value is empty we want to set the value back to the title attribute and remove the class of focused $ document ready function $ input title each function if $ this val === $ this val $ this attr title $ this focus function if $ this val === $ this attr title $ this val addclass focused $ this blur function if $ this val === $ this val $ this attr title removeclass focused see demo and thats it its just a little bit of code but it can go a long way so take it and build on it 