IE is submitting placeholder text on empty fields

Question

I'm having an issue where IE is submitting the placeholder text as actual data to the server. The field is optional, so it'll contain placeholder text like

"Optional Description (e.g. my category)"

The problem is, if the user doesn't enter anything, then the form submission will submit that text which gets saved in the database. Does anyone know why it's doing this and/or how to fix it? I was gonna hack it and just check if the value is the same as that text, then replace it with an empty string, but I have a several fields like this and... well... hacks are bad.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I was about to delete this question, but after a lot of digging, I found out that the culprit was jQuery.html5form.js. I removed it and the problem went away. I will submit an issue with them. I wanted this to remain here in case someone else happens to run into this unlikely issue.