jQuery 1.6 has better attributes

The jQuery developers have announced the release of version 1.6 of the widely used JavaScript library. The highlights include performance improvements and a major rewrite of the Attribute model. The update also includes numerous bug fixes and cross browser compatibility improvements.

The Attribute module improvements in the library see much better performance of the attr() and val() methods, support for boolean attributes and hooks have been added to allow the two methods to be extended. Performance has also been improved in event handling which has in turn improved the performance of jQuery's data() which allows data to be attached to any DOM element. Other changes see the ":focus" selector working properly across all browsers, find(), closest() and is() methods now all take DOM elements or jQuery objects, relative CSS support ported from the animate() method and smoother, more synchronised animation.

There are a number of breaking changes which may require code changes: case mapping of data attributes now matches the HTML5 spec and, because a clear line has been drawn between properties and attributes, the prop(), removeProp() and attr() methods behave differently. A summary of the changes is available in the announcement and a "by changed API method" list is available. The developers are now moving onto jQuery 1.7 and are accepting proposals for new features and changes with an eye to an August release. Among the latest adopters of jQuery is Ruby on Rails: from version 3.1, jQuery will be the default JavaScript library in the opinionated web framework.

jQuery 1.6 is available to download from the jQuery site, jQuery content delivery network (CDN) or Google's and Microsoft's CDNs. jQuery is licensed under either MIT or GPLv2 licences.

(djwm)