jQuery contains powerful methods for changing and manipulating HTML elements and attributes.
One very important part of jQuery is the possibility to manipulate the DOM.
jQuery comes with a bunch of DOM related methods that make it easy to access and manipulate elements and attributes.
DOM = Document Object Model The DOM defines a standard for accessing HTML and XML documents: "The W3C Document Object Model (DOM) is a platform and language-neutral interface that allows programs and scripts to dynamically access and update the content, structure, and style of a document." |
Three simple, but useful, jQuery methods for DOM manipulation are:
The following example demonstrates how to get content with the jQuery text() and html() methods:
The following example demonstrates how to get the value of an input field with the jQuery val() method:
The jQuery attr() method is used to get attribute values.
The following example demonstrates how to get the value of the href attribute in a link:
The next chapter explains how to set (change) content and attribute values.
For a complete overview of all jQuery HTML methods, please go to our jQuery HTML/CSS Reference.