Question

Please see the code here:

http://jsfiddle.net/wQpTu/1/

For some reason, it always returns false on the .is(‘:visible’) whether or not it is visible.

Any reason why? Anything I should be doing differently?

Answer 1

You need to use:

var visibleElement = $('#holder').find("span#spanselect").is(":visible");

spanselect is an id, not a class.

$("#holder span#spanselect") would work just the same, by the way. For the record, you can changed is(":visible") to length ans saw it was equal to 0, and easily see the selector fails.

Example: http://jsfiddle.net/kobi/wQpTu/5/