Learning jQuery: A Hands-on Guide to Building Rich Interactive Web Front Ends

5. Selectors and Filters

This rather extensive chapter covers how you can use jQuery to select specific components of a web page. This is the basis of all dynamic processes in a web page, but also of the targeted formatting of individual web page areas. The classic approach is selecting via names, object fields, or native Document Object Model (DOM) methods because every web page is represented as DOM in the browser.¹ Object fields are—as the name indicates—available via an array notation (and limited to it) and only work for a few elements.² Access via the name from within JavaScript is also only possible to a limited extent.³ And with regard to conceivable options, the native DOM methods only permit very limited selection options (for example, ...