This is the total amount of fixes and new features that have come out in the past week, or so. I’ll be adding more info concerning them to the docs very soon.

New Demo:

• Accordian Open/Close – Toggle open/close a number of entries at once!

New Features:

• empty() – you can remove all child nodes of an element.

  // Deletes the contents of all DIV elements
  $("div").empty();

• is(Expression) – tests to see if the matched elements matches that expression. Is equivalent to: $().filter(Expression).size() > 0.

  // Tests to see if a DIV has a class of test
  if ( $("div").is(".test") ) {
    alert( "test div found!" );
  }

• html() – If you provide no parameter to the html() method it will return the innerHTML of the first element.

  // Copy the HTML contents into a Textarea
  $("textarea").val( $("#block").html() );

• val() – Same as the html() method, but for the value parameter (if an argument is provided, it sets the value, no parameter – returns the first value).

  // Copy a value from one input to another
  $("input#hidden").val( $("input#name").val() );

• $.postXML() and $.getXML – For the AJAX plugin, same as $.post() and $.get(), but forcefully try to get the returned XML, regardless of the Content-Type.

  // Get the XML contents of a file
  $.getXML("file.xml",function(xml){
    $(xml).find("title") // ...
  });

• A new ‘normal’ speed (400ms) for animations was added.

  // Slide a DIV in at normal speed
  $("div").slideDown("normal");

• Setting an onComplete handler for animations is much easier now.

  $("div").show("slow",function(){
    alert("all done!");
  });

Bug Fixes:

• Opera and the AJAX plugin now play nicely together.
• A problem with appending text nodes was resolved.
• Handling for IE and the AJAX plugin was optomized.
• A problem with #id expressions retreiving by tag was fixed.
• A fix for removing classes that have dashes in them was implemented.
• A bug with binding events to dynamically created HTML was fixed.
• A bug with show() not revealing elements that have a display of none, by default, was fixed.
• Another Prototype 1.3 and jQuery bug was resolved.
• The mangling of the overflow attribute, by the animations, was resolved.
• and finally: The infamous height/width auto animation bug has been resolved!

Mark Panay has written a follow up to JQuery for Web Designers. This time he emphasizes keeping content brief and using jQuery to reveal the full body of blog posts and articles. This is very similar to a technique that I have been using in my latest project, Ouioo.

Also, Mark has launched a new music start-up whose web site makes use of jQuery fx and AJAX. To quote Mark:

[jQuery] replaces, the “behaviour, prototype and AHAH” scripts there before, thus saving me about 150k… :) and making the code cleaner and easier to modify. Only took 30 mins as well.

Finally, Frank Quednau has released a blog post and a jQuery querying demo. If you’re curious as to what exactly jQuery is capable of querying – this makes for a good sandbox to go in and play around with things.