Question

What am I doing wrong on the first example? It’s not targetting the span and applying the background color. But the second example works great

1st.

    if($(".done").length > 0) {
        $(this).css("background","red");
    }

2nd.

    if($(".done").length > 0) {
        $(".done").css("background","red");
    }

Answer 1

The this value is not affected by merely running a selector through jQuery. In fact, you can’t change the this value at all within the confines of a particular function.

You could try this:

if($(".done").length > 0) {
    $('done').each(function() { $(this).css("background","red"); });
}

Best to cache the $(".done") thing of course. In this case, if that’s really all the code that’s there, there’s no reason to do the test on the length anyway.