Question

When any item of class ui-widget-content experiences a hover, I want class ui-state-hover to be applied (and subsequently removed). The ui-state-default is applied by default, and so on for focus and active.

Am I missing an obvious part of jquery/jquery-ui, or do we have to write our own (admittedly rather simple) function for this?

http://jqueryui.com/docs/Theming/API

Answer 1

You should apply classes manually yourself, try :

$(".ui-state-default").hover(function(){
    $(this).addClass('ui-state-hover');
}, function(){
    $(this).removeClass('ui-state-hover');
});

edit
An element could not have ui-widget-content and ui-state-default classes together.