If you want to make a form without labels for text inputs or textareas, and instead give the fields default values, you will encounter a little annoying problem, when you focus the field to write something the default value stays there. To make the default value disappear you will need a few lines of javascript.
$('textarea, input:text').bind('focus click', function(){ if (this.value == this.defaultValue) { this.value = ''; } }).bind('blur', function(){ if (this.value == '') { this.value = this.defaultValue; } });
Note that this script uses jQuery so in order to work you’ll need to have jQuery installed.
To make all clear here is a demo.
I suggest using the placeholder attribute from HTML5 for storing the default value.
It would be preferred to initially check if the placeholder attribute has built-in browser support, and only if it’s not available to run the few lines of script to enable this behavior.
In 2011 all we need is to be semantic ;)