Question

HTML

<textarea id="photo-42-9" class="comment_box">Write a comment...</textarea>

jQuery code that doesn’t work, what am I missing?

$('#photo-42-9').prepend("<div>blah</div>");

EDIT
Corrected the ids mismatch, still doesn’t work though

Answer 1

prepend() adds the specified mark-up into the object returned by the jQuery selector (in this case the textarea). A textarea can contain only text, no other child elements; therefore you’re trying to create invalid html.

If you want to put the <div> before the textarea:

$('<div>blah</div>').insertBefore('#photo-42-9');

If you want to prepend new text into the textarea:

$('#photo-42-9').val(
    function(i,val){
        return 'blah ' + val;
    });

References:

• prepend().
• insertBefore().
• val().