jQuery Forum

You can just do 

Can't you just do this ? :

You can already do :

$("selector",context) and $(context).find("selector") are, for all intents and purposes, IDENTICAL operations, as the former is automatically converted into the latter on the fly.  Using elem.selector inside of a NEW string selector is way less performant than either of the other two options.

Oh ok then in that case maybe we should have some more information of different ways of selecting elements on the documentation :)

I agree that more information about selectors would be a good thing. The challenge is determining where the best for would be for providing that information. While the API already has fairly comprehensive descriptions, along with examples and demos, its usefulness would suffer if it tried to do much more than its already doing. We've talked on the jQuery team about an official set of "guides" for the sort of thing you're describing -- more detailed information that leans more toward tutorial or "best practice." Again, we'll need to find a suitable place for these documents. We'll also need to find time to write them.

--Karl

The jQuery API comment system was created with the PHP system as a model. The unfortunate thing is that people often treat the comment system there as a forum or bug tracker, which quickly gets out of hand. Originally I think the idea was that most comments addressing problems or inconsistencies in the docs would be addressed and the comments themselves deleted.

The api.jquery.com site is meant to be a reference (not a tutorial) for each call. I agree with Karl that it would be great to have tutorials as well, but they don't really belong in the individual api.jquery.com pages. Usually tutorial information crosses several different methods, for example it might discuss their tradeoffs or compare/contrast them.  You wouldn't want that information to be repeated on all those reference pages. So something on the best selectors or selection methods would be a tutorial. A separate tutorial could address the issues with the ajax family ($.ajax(), $().load(), $().post(), etc.) including things like cross-domain requests and jsonp considerations.