Question

A lot of time I see jQuery code that looks like this:

$('a').live( 'click', function(event){
..
});

What does the event parameter do? Does it correspond to the element ‘a’ or the event ‘live’?

Answer 1

It means that every anchor element on the page (a) as well as any dynamically added anchor elements in the future will have a click event attached to them that will run whatever the function is passed in.

jQuery documentation of the live method

the parameter event of the function that is passed in is the result of a click on an anchor element. If you are using Firefox with Firebug you can examine this object by doing this:

$("a").live("click", function(event) { 
    console.dir(event);
});

When you click on an anchor you will then be able to see the whole object in the Firebug console.