jQuery Forum

they do accomplish the same thing.

SImple use case difference change your example to $('.joe li') and suppose you have 5 lists <ul class="joe">

$('.joe li') would be a group of all li's in all joe which might work for some parts of your app, however if you only want to work within one list, you can specify the parent "joe" and do a find() within that parent. With dynamic pages and lots of "joe's" you need to be able to create these contexts so events don't occur in the wrong place

This can also help with preformance. Define the parent(s) var $joe=$('.joe'), now this is cached in jQuery object and

$joe.find('a')
$joe.find('img')
$joe.find('li')

will perform better than

$('.joe a')
$('.joe img')
$('.joe li')



hope this helps a bit

the second part I got, but the first part confused me a bit...

$('.joe li') would be a group of all li's in all joe which might work for some parts of your app, however if you only want to work within one list, you can specify the parent "joe" and do a find() within that parent. With dynamic pages and lots of "joe's" you need to be able to create these contexts so events don't occur in the wrong place

that part I didn't understand. What do you mean specify the parent "joe", how would it be different with find?  Couldn't I do something like $(".joe:first li") ?

To specify a particular joe in this case would require know the index of joe so that you could do

$('.joe').eq(2).find('li')

The basic thing about find is that it goes deeper than children, which is just one level.

yes you can, often there are many ways to traverse to an element.