Semalt: What Is jQuery? An Overview Of 5 Famous Element Selectors!

jQuery is the cross-platform JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML. It is one of the most deployed JavaScript libraries. It was designed to navigate through web documents, create animations, select DOM elements and develop Ajax applications. jQuery helps developers and programmers create different web scrapers, applications, and plugins. It also allows them to create an abstraction for the low-level animation and interaction, themes and widgets.

The most distinctive features of jQuery are DOM element selection and fusing algorithms. Both Microsoft and Nokia bundle jQuery on their own platforms; Microsoft has included it in Visual Studio, ASP.NET MVC, and ASP.NET AJAX, while Nokia has integrated jQuery into its Run-Time widget development platforms.

An Overview of jQuery Selectors:

jQuery JavaScript library is mostly used to get or modify the content and HTML elements of a webpage. It is widely used to apply the effects like animations, hide and show, and to create beautiful and eye-catching websites. Selecting the elements with a typical JavaScript approach or another method could be very painful, but the jQuery Selectors work like magic. They allow you to select and manipulate the HTML elements instantly and are mainly used to find or select the elements based on their names, IDs, types, classes, values, and attributes. You should bear in mind that all jQuery selectors start with the dollar sign and parentheses: $(), and they have their own distinctive characteristics.

1. Basic jQuery selectors:

With the basic jQuery selectors, you can easily select the elements of a webpage using their ID $("#id"), class $(".class") and tag name $("li"). You can combine them or use them individually to get desired results. The combined jQuery selectors will look something like $("selector1, selector2, selector3").

2. Index-based jQuery selectors:

If you don't get the desired results with the basic jQuery selectors, you can opt for the index-based selectors. jQuery is best known for providing its own set of index-based selectors, all of which use zero-based indexing. It means that to choose the third element you will need to use the index 2. The most popular types of index-based jQuery selectors are eq(n) selector, it(n) selector, gt(n) selector, last selector, first selector, even selector and odd selector.

3. Child jQuery selectors:

jQuery allows you to choose the children of a particular element based on their types or index. The CSS child selectors, for example, are far different from other child selectors and possess their distinctive web indexing features.

4. Attribute jQuery selectors:

With the attribute jQuery selectors, you can easily select the elements based on their values and attributes. When working with these selectors, we should bear in mind that they consider multiple spaces separated values as the single string. For instance, $("a[rel='nofollow']") is not going to match $("a[rel='nofollow other']").

5. Content jQuery selectors:

The content selectors are based on the web content and HTML elements. They come in four different types and show how the content of a webpage should be indexed or structured. They come in either text or image form and possess their distinctive features.