Category: Beyond the DOM with jQuery utility functions

In this lesson we surveyed the features that jQuery provides outside of the methods that operate on a jQuery object. These included an assortment of functions, as well as a set of flags, defined directly on the jQuery top-level name (as well as its $ alias). First, you learned about the flags that deal with animations. Setting $.fx.off lets you completely…

This section will explore the set of utility functions that are pretty much a category on their own. We’ll start with one that doesn’t seem to do much. Doing nothing jQuery defines a utility function that does nothing, literally. This function could have been named $.uselessFunctionThatDoesNothing(), but that’s a tad long, so it’s named $.noop(). It’s defined…

The majority of jQuery features implemented as utility functions are designed to operate on JavaScript objects other than the DOM elements. Generally, anything designed to operate on the DOM is provided as a jQuery method. Although some of these functions can be used to operate on DOM elements—which are JavaScript objects, after all—the focus of the utility…

A few features that jQuery makes available to page authors are available not via methods or functions but as properties defined on $. In the past, several jQuery plugin authors have relied on these features to develop their plugins. But as will be evident in a few pages, some of them have been deprecated and their…

This lesson covers Up to this point, we’ve spent a number of lessons examining the jQuery methods that operate upon a set of DOM elements selected by using the $() function. But you may recall that way back in lesson 1 we also introduced the concept of utility functions—functions namespaced by jQuery/$ that don’t operate on a jQuery object. These functions could…