Question

When I have elements surrounded by a P tag, or SPAN tag, why does jQuery fail to find next(), even though the element does indeed have a direct sibling?

<p>
 <img src="" width="40" height="40"
  onmouseover="alert('next() is ' + $(this).next().length)" />
  &lt;-- mouseover me
 <div></div>
</p>​

If I change the P tag to a SPAN tag, same problem occurs. If I remove the P tag or change it to almost any other tag, it works fine.

JSFiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/YHTGT/

Answer 1

div is not a valid node within a p node, so the parser is probably eliding it entirely. If it had content, I’d expect it to be moved in the DOM tree to after the p node, making it not a sibling of the img.

Changing the div to a span works because the span is allowed there.