What is this thing I see in Internet Explorer jQuery1281617118201="24" , jQuery1281617118201="26" on some of my markup ?

Question

Title says it all .. Thanks :)

Answer 1

I'm not 100% sure, but I think it's a property set by jQuery to speed up DOM element selection.

I would think the reason that it only appears in IE is that it laks support for a bunch of native getElements methods (ie. document.getElementByClassName)

EDIT:

I was partly right (I think). In the source code of (jQuery 1.4.2) at line 986 it's a generated attribute base on the now() method. The underlying method seems to have with cache of jQuery to do. The cache is used when selecting elements so you don't have to fetch the same element twice.

Answer 2

Was that code generated by your app or it's found in a third party code?

It looks like an internal jQuery variable used to maintain a state or to point to another jQuery (DOM) object.

Answer 3

It is a property added so that jQuery can track data associated with that element.

Things like event handlers you attach using jQuery:

$('someElement').click(function() {
    // run code 
});

or data you add to the element using .data()

$('someElement').data('myData', 'myValue');

are some of the associations.

jQuery doesn't add that property until it is necessary.

You can view the data associated with an element using the number at the end, as in:

jQuery1281617118201=“26”

console.log(​jQuery.cache[26]);​  // will show the data for element number 26 in the cache