jQuery Forum

$('#foo li a') will get the direct a children of the li's so you could shorten things - 

Hi Dave!

Thanks so much for your help, I really appreciate it!!! :)

Your first method will work fine as long as all the anchor elements exist when the handler is attached.

Awesome! The anchors will exist when the handler is attached.

My biggest concern was that I am not using on() in the most optimal way; thanks to your reply, I feel better now.

Also, unless you have have need for them later, you can remove the intermediate variables and just do this:

This is actually for a plugin, and I use the other vars in various spots, but I really appreciate the code optimization tip.

The benefit of the second method is that it lets you use delegation to handle events for elements that don't exist at the time the handler code is run. The will result in the same functionality but their meaning is different.

That makes sense, thanks for the explanation.

The second attaches the handler to the li children of the foo element but only runs the function if the the event was originated from an anchor element.

Interesting! Just out of curiosity, is there any way for me to only select immediate children <a>s using on()? In other words:

1. $('ul#foo > li').on('click focus', '> a', function() { ... });

I'm pretty sure I've tested something similar to the above with no luck...

I really like the idea of using the "second" method, but I don't want to apply the click/focus handler to <a>s that are deeper than the first child (for example).

Hopefully I'm making sense here.

Thanks again Dave, I really appreciate it!!!!

Cheers,
Micky