Conclusion

In this lesson we’ve gone beyond the art of selecting elements and started manipulating their attributes and properties. In these pages you discovered the differences between attributes and properties and how you can operate on them using jQuery. In addition, you learned how to perform basic tasks—for example, forcing external links to be opened in a new page—just by adding or changing an attribute.

Another important role methods played in this lesson was to manage custom data. As you’ve seen, some methods have an interesting behavior that can be confusing. Hopefully we’ve cleared up any confusion by the examples we used.

Updating or removing properties, data, and attributes may be useful, but you need further exploration to see the real power of jQuery. You also need to understand concepts such as moving elements, creating new elements to wrap others, and handling events. In the next lesson we’ll delve into some of these topics.