title: Cannot clear the form after Submit using the Validation plugin in jQuery
body: <p>I an quite new to jQuery and I have a problem while trying to create a form. I am using the Validation plugin for validate the email (one the form's field).
  When I click the Submit button I want to call my own function because I want to save the data in an XML file. </p>
  
  <p>This is my button: (as I understood the plugin uses "submit" for understand the button)</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;input type="submit" name="submit" class="submit" id="submit_btn" value="Send"/&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and here is the script for the validation:</p>
  
  <pre><code> &lt;script type="text/javascript"&gt;
    $(document).ready(function() {
  
          //this is my form
   $("#contactForm").validate();
  
   /*save the valid data in the xml*/
   $(".submit").click(function() { 
   var email = $("input#email").val();
   var subject = $("input#subject").val();
   var message = $("textarea#message").val();
  
   if (email == "" || !$("#contactForm").valid()) {
     return false;
    }    
  
   var dataString = 'email='+ email + '&amp;subject=' + subject + '&amp;message=' + message;
   //alert("DATA: " +dataString);  
  
    $.ajax({
       type: "POST",
       url: "SaveData.jsp",
       data: dataString,  
       success: function(data){}   
    });
  
    return false;
  });
  });
  &lt;/script&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>In general it works ok but I have two basic problems.
  When I click the button in the beginning having all the form empty, I get no message for the field required. Also when the data are valid and I am doing the submit, the form does not become clear after the submit. </p>
  
  <p>If I deleted this script code, these actions are working properly but I can not save the data!</p>
  
  <p>Does anyone know what is wrong?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks a lot!</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p>I found something finally. 
  I changed the line:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$(".submit").click(function() {....}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>with this one:</p>
  
  <pre><code>submitHandler: function() { ....}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>So now when I click the button I get the right message for the required field. The only thing I haven't found yet is how to clear the form after submitting.
  I know how to do this manually in an other function, but I saw that the Plugin does this thing also. So I was thinking that probably is better to use the one the Plugin has. </p>
  
  <p>So does anyone know what it wrong?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks</p>