Question

I understand that both of these will insert html into an element.

What are the differences between these 2 methods though?

String:

$("div").append("<h1>Header</h1>");

Object:

$("div").append($("<h1>Header</h1>"));

Is it just that you can do stuff like this?

$("div").append($("<h1></h1>").html("Header"));

Answer 1

Is it just that you can do stuff like this?

$("div").append($("<h1></h1>").html("Header"));

Exactly

Doing it this way creates for you a jQuery object which can further be manipulated with functions like append, css, addClass

$("div").append($("<h1></h1>").html("Header")
                              .addClass("someClass")
                              .css("color", "gree"));

Or if you don’t want to do further manipulation like this, then by all means pass it just a string, and you’ll get the same result.