Best way to add DOM elements with jQuery

Question

So I've seen three ways to add html/DOM elements to a page. I'm curious what the pros and cons are for each of them.

1 - Traditional JavaScript

I beleive the strait JS way to do it is by constructing each element, setting attributes, and then appending them. Example:

var myRow = document.createElement("tr");
myRow.class = "myClass";

var firstTD = document.createElement("td");
firstTD.innerHtml = "first";
myRow.appendChild(firstTD);

var secondTD = document.createElement("td");
secondTD.innerHtml = "second";
myRow.appendChild(secondTD);

document.getElementById("myContainer").appendChild(myRow);

2 - Appending a string of html via jQuery

I've noticed that most jQuery examples I see usually just append a string of html.
Example:

$("#myContainer").append('<tr class="myClass"><td>first</td><td>second</td></tr>');

3 - jQuery's .clone()

I'v also seen a lot of uses and references to .clone() in jQuery.
Example:

$("#myContainer").append($(".myClass").Clone());

I'd love to hear what others have to say about this.

(Also, this seems like a good canidate for a 'community wiki', but I'm not too familiar with them. Will someone comment and let me know if it should be? Thanks)

Answer 1

1) + You require no library / - it's more tedious to write and maybe harder to read depending on who is maintaining the code.

2) + easier to read/write (well, less to type) / - you have the overhead of a library, jQuery

3) + good if you want to duplicate an item / - you have the overhead of a library, jQuery as well as if it isn't a straight clone, you will need to have code to modify the contents.

Answer 2

The cleaner way to do is using jQuery.

$('tr').addClass('myClass') like syntax. This is easy to read, understand and maintain.

Answer 3

If you have jQuery already available, use it. If you don't want to host it, use Google's hosted version. In the end is it always calling the native javascript createElement or innerHTML methods anyway. So I'd use #2, and #3 if I specifically had to clone an existing element on the page.

Answer 4

If you are using jQuery 1.4 the best way is the following:

$("<a/>", {
    id: 'example-link',
    href: 'http://www.example.com/',
    text: 'Example Page'
}).appendTo("body");

Answer 5

If you already have a template element that you want to copy then by all means use clone().

But if you want to create an element from scratch then there's basically two methods which I think you alluded to:

1. Create DOM elements as objects (using createElement for example).
2. Create DOM elements as HTML (using innerHTML or jQuery's html() for example).

First if either of the methods is more intuitive or easier to write for you, I'd recommend just doing that.

Otherwise benefits of using the latter is that it is cleaner if the element has many children. For example, try to make a table row with 6 columns, each with a different class using the first method. Your code will be much longer than if you used the second method.

As far as performance goes this is a good guide http://andrew.hedges.name/experiments/innerhtml/ but the short answer is for most cases the differences are quite negligible. A good guide for performance in general as well is: http://www.artzstudio.com/2009/04/jquery-performance-rules/. The 6th tip has to do with DOM manipulation.