In my SP Online (2013) site I have some heavily customised list input forms, the input fields of which I have been quite happily referencing using jQuery using the following syntax:

    $('input[title="IncidentStatus"]').val($nextStageValueParam);

and so on...

Anyway, today (Monday 27th Jan 2014), these forms' rendering started to fail despite previously having been OK.  On closer investigation, I narrowed down the issue to those fields which I have marked as 'required' when defining the SP column.

Drilling down into the DOM I notice that the title attribute for the mandatory fields is now suffixed with the string 'Required Field', example below:

    <select id="ctl00_ctl41_g_9f8b1d26_1bb4_4f9f_b081_2e5349ec8998_ff21_ctl00_Lookup" class="fg_initial" title="IncidentStatus Required Field" name="ctl00$ctl41$g_9f8b1d26_1bb4_4f9f_b081_2e5349ec8998$ff21$ctl00$Lookup" fgid="fg_incidentBranch"></select>

Now thankfully, this is fairly straightforward to resolve by using the jQuery 'begins with' attribute selector (e.g.

    $('input[title^="IncidentStatus"]').val($nextStageValueParam);

)

Has anyone else experienced a similar problem recently?  Is is something I should have been aware about?