Question

Is there a restriction on the complexity of selectors that can be used with delegate in jQuery 1.4.2?

This works for me:

   $('.activeTabsList').delegate('.activeTabsListItem', 'click', 
function() { 
   alert('here'); 
});

This does not work:

    $('.activeTabsList').delegate('.activeTabsListItem:not(.selected)', 'click', 
function() { 
   alert('here'); 
});

As you can probably assume, there is only 1 item at a time that has the selected class. When I click the other tabs, my delegate handler is still not fired.

Answer 1

The code you have works, you can see a demo here. Make sure that your selector matches like you think it does, this is most likely the issue….delegate() itself handles this case.

Usually this happens as a result of something like this, over-assigning the selected class:

$(".activeTabsListItem").click(function() {
  $(".activeTabsListItem").addClass("selected"); //should have been $(this)
});