Creating DOM Elements with jQuery

In your desire to enhance your JavaScript code, you're curious about leveraging jQuery's functionality to simplify DOM manipulation.

jQuery does offer alternative ways to create DOM elements, as you've noticed with $.create("div"). However, this approach is not part of jQuery's core API and may not always be reliable.

For a more efficient and standardized solution, consider the following:

this.$OuterDiv = $('<div></div>')
    .hide()
    .append($('<table></table>')
        .attr({ cellSpacing : 0 })
        .addClass("text")
    )
;

This concise code accomplishes the same as your original JavaScript by:

• Creating a
  element using $('

  ).
• Hiding it with .hide().
• Appending a element with $.append(), setting its properties and adding a class.

  Benchmarking Results

  Regarding the performance of different element creation methods, a benchmark revealed that document.createElement is the fastest. However, the time differences between the methods are minimal in modern versions of jQuery (e.g., 3 milliseconds per thousand elements).

  Updated for jQuery 1.7.2

  The benchmark has been updated with jQuery 1.7.2 and is available at http://jsben.ch/#/ARUtz for further exploration and crowdsourced results.