....of the kind of wacky stuff you can do with CSS/JS with these example descriptions. Those could just as easily be "Jane" and "Smith" and so on.

That's a good point that the examples go away when you tab into the text field, but I've found that when I've used this UI, my eye goes naturally to the example first, and then as I tab into the box I merely type in what it asked for. My memory's not /that/ bad ;) so I find this easy and self-documenting without making the form ridiculously long.

Of course for phone numbers, postal codes, and that kind of thing, the example would probably be more useful just displayed next to the field... "I can't remember; did they want (xxx) xxx-xxxx or xxxxxxxxxxx or....?" Wonder if we need to build in an option for this... hmmm...

The example does degrade, however. If you take a look at the screenshots posted along with the patches, when JS isn't there, the example is merely displayed beside the field as "Example: foo"

However, if you have usability concerns about this patch please by all means add a comment to the issue. The last thing I want to do is end up having this feature become /more/ confusing for people, rather than less. :)