title: Getting selected option that does not have selected attribute
body: <p>So if this is my example code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;select id="box1" name="selectArea"&gt;
  &lt;option value="98"&gt;dog&lt;/option&gt;
  &lt;option value="7122"&gt;cat&lt;/option&gt;
  &lt;option value="142"&gt;bird&lt;/option&gt;
  &lt;/select&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and this is my jQuery code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>var x = document.getElementsByName("selectArea")[0];
  var selected = x.options[x.selectedIndex].value;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The value of this is always wrong because there is no "selected" attribute in the options. In my case, I am using a new form and users have the option to select a value. When they select an option, the "selected" attribute doesn't get appended to the option automatically.</p>
  
  <p>How would I go about choosing the option that's selected without the actual selected attribute? Is this even possible? When I select another option in the dropdown, the value of x.selectedIndex does not change.</p>