I want to make all my settings forms across my site confirm that changes are saved, kinda like facebook does if you make changes in a form and then try to navigate away without saving. So I'm disabling the submit button on the forms only enabling if the values change. I then prompt the user to hit save before they leave the page in the case that they do have changes pending.

var form = $('form.edit');
if(form.length > 0) {
  var orig_str = form.serialize();
  $(':submit',form).attr('disabled','disabled');
  form.on('change keyup', function(){
    if(form.serialize() == orig_str) {
      setConfirmUnload(false);
      $(':submit',form).attr('disabled','disabled');
    } else {
      setConfirmUnload(true);
      $(':submit',form).removeAttr('disabled')
    }
  });
  $('input[type=submit]').click(function(){ setConfirmUnload(false); });
}
function setConfirmUnload(on) {
  window.onbeforeunload = (on) ? unloadMessage : null;
}
function unloadMessage() {
  return 'If you navigate away from this page without saving your changes, they will be lost.';
}

One of these forms needs some additional validation which I do using jQuery.validate library. e.g. if i wanted to ensure the user can't double submit the form on accident by double clicking on submit or somesuch (the actual validation in question is for a credit-card form and not this simple):

$('form').validate({
  submitHandler: function(form) {
    $(':submit', form).attr('disabled','disabled');
    form.submit();
  }
});

Unfortunately both bits are trying to bind to submit button and they're interfering with each other such that the submit button remains disabled no matter what I do and it is impossible to submit the form at all.

Is there some way to chain the validations together or something? Or some other way to avoid re-writing the validation code to repeat the "did you change anything in the form" business?