Check out buddies.js, a couple clean well-tested library functions to populate and extract data from html forms in one method.

el = $("#foo") # the html above
# use the object attribute short_title and put it in the short-title form input
atts = {short_title : 'short-title'}

FormManager.populate ob, el, atts

See more: http://hssc.github.com/buddies-js/

There is a great working example on the home page.

Thanks for the OSS Contribution

Thanks goes out to core contributors Jed Schneider and Gary Fredericks