What is the status of jQuery's multi-argument content syntax: deprecated, supported, documented?

Question

I've never seen this in any jQuery docs I've read; nor, have I ever seen it in the wild. I just observed multi-content syntax working here for the after modifier with jQuery 1.4.2. Is this supported syntax? Is it deprecated?

$(".section.warranty .warranty_checks :last").after(
  $('<div class="little check" />').click( function () {
      alert('hi')                                       
  } )                                                   
  , $('<span>OEM</span>')  /*Notice this (a second) argument */    
);                                       

Here is the signature for after: .after( content ). But, as my example shows it should be .after( content [, content...] )

I've never seen any indication in the jQuery grammar that any of the functions accept more than one argument (content) in such a fashion.

UPDATE: What did it do? I left this out thinking it was obvious:

It inserts a <div class="little check" /> with the aforementioned callback on .click() and follows it up with a totally new sibling element <span>OEM</span>.

See this follow-up for a question about how to rewrite this.

Answer 1

Yes this works, though it's not technically supported, you can see a demo here.

If you give .after() multiple arguments, it'll append them one at a time.

You can see the relevant jQuery core code here: http://github.com/jquery/jquery/blob/master/src/manipulation.js#L141

It takes all the arguments provided and pushes them on the stack for insertion...but since this isn't a documented feature, it may change in any future jQuery release (though it appears safe for at least 1.4.3).

Answer 2

According to the docs it is not allowed, but you see in the code that it is possible (what you however already know from your experiments ;-) )

after: function() {
    if ( this[0] && this[0].parentNode ) {
        return this.domManip(arguments, false, function( elem ) {
            this.parentNode.insertBefore( elem, this.nextSibling );
        });
    } else if ( arguments.length ) {
        var set = this.pushStack( this, "after", arguments );
        set.push.apply( set, jQuery(arguments[0]).toArray() );
        return set;
    }
},