jQuery – Best Practice for creating complex HTML Fragments

With jQuery 1.4, you can create HTML elements like so:

// create an element with an object literal, defining properties
var e = $("<a />", {
    href: "#",
    "class": "a-class another-class", // you need to quote "class" since it's a reserved keyword
    title: "..."
});

// add the element to the body
$("body").append(e);

Here’s a link to the documentation.

I’m not sure that this approach is faster than using the html() function of jQuery. Or faster than skipping jQuery all together and use the innerHTML property on an element. But as far as readability goes; the jQuery-approach is my favorite. And in most cases the performance-gain of using innerHTML is marginal.