 <p>I think your best option might be to just hack the plugin in this case, as it is really stupid that the plugin doesn't have an error handler anyway. hint: maybe tell the author of the plugin that it would be nice and useful to handle errors (what if connection fails or anything?? plugin will never know and no feedback for user).</p> <p>It should suffice if you add something like this around line 33 in <code>jquery.rest_in_place.js</code> after the success option</p> <pre><code>"error": function(xhr, state, error) { //do error handling here e.g. alert(state); //or $.parseJSON(xhr.responseText) and whatever or similar } </code></pre>