Question

In jQuery there are a few colon selectors like

:prev, :next, :last

My question is:

1. Are they truly part of jQuery, because they are actually used on DOM elements?
2. We seem to have equivalent methods as well in jQuery prev(), next(), last(). What is the purpose of having 2 different ways?

Any basic examples would be really great.

Answer 1

jQuery does not have :prev or :next selectors, I have no idea where you came across them. There is a :last selector, though, as well as :first, provided by the Sizzle selector library, used by jQuery. It is a non-standard selector, not part of CSS, and is thus implemented in JavaScript.

One purpose of the :last selector over the .last() method is so you can use it to filter elements in the middle of a selector sequence, like this (note that :last and :last-child are not the same):

$('.a > .b:last > .c')

Rather than having to write a chain of methods like this:

$('.a').children('.b').last().children('.c');

By the way, the “colon selectors” you refer to are called pseudo-classes (colloquially but incorrectly known as “pseudo-selectors”).