Learning jQuery - Fourth Edition

Revisiting attribute manipulation

By now, we are very used to getting and setting values that are associated with DOM elements. We have done this with simple methods like .attr(), .prop(), and .css(), convenient shorthands such as .addClass(), .css(), and .val(), and complex bundles of behavior such as .animate(). Even the simple methods, though, do quite a bit of work for us behind the scenes. We can get yet more utility out of them if we better understand what they do.

Using shorthand element-creation syntax

We often create new elements in our jQuery code by providing an HTML string to the $() function or to DOM insertion functions. For example, we create a quite large HTML fragment in Listing 12.9 in order to produce many DOM elements. This ...