Question

Is there any reason I would use $('<div></div>') instead of $('<div>')?

Or $('<div><b></b></div>') instead of $('<div><b>')?

I like the latter in both cases because it is shorter.

Answer 1

That depends on whether you use a single tag or multiple tags to create the element/elements.

If you use a single tag, jQuery will use the document.createElement method to create the element, so it doesn’t matter if you use "<div/>" or "<div></div>".

If you have several elements, jQuery will create the elements by creating a div element and put the HTML code in the innerHTML property. To get the browser to parse the HTML code properly, you have to write it according to the HTML version you are using. If you are using XHTML for the page, the HTML code that you use to create elements has to be XHTML also.