Comments on: Quick Tips – jQuery: Giving your selectors some context

By: andygirvan

andygirvan — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 15:57:13 +0000

Additionally there is a great stackoverflow article about this:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2421782/perf...

By: andygirvan

andygirvan — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 15:13:31 +0000

Actually there is a subtle difference.

The way $('ul.menu li') would work would be to search through the DOM to find all list items within a located ul.menu.

The other way of doing it - $('li','ul.menu') would only target the unordered list when performing the search.

By: Seb

Seb — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 13:31:31 +0000

$('li','ul.menu'); is functionally equivalent to $('ul.menu li'); Far more useful, I find, are the is the ability to pass another jQuery object as the second parameter, e.g. the results from an earlier query, or a dom object, such as the document object of an external xml file retrieved from an ajax query.

var menu = $('ul.menu');
$('li', menu);