jQuery 1.6 Enhances Web Apps

jQuery is the most popular open source Javascript framework for building web apps. The newly released version 1.6 brings improvements in speed and animation that will benefit the 32% of websites built using jQuery.

Separating HTML attributes from Javascript properties brings the biggest change to jQuery 1.6, which previously were combined together. Attributes are values set in a page's HTML code while properties are DOM elements that may be dynamic. By providing separate methods for managing attributes and properties, all browsers see significant performance improvements.

Additional upgrades include:

• Event handlers, like detecting focus on an element, are also now faster due to optimizations in the .data() method.
• Animations can be synced so that multiple instances can share a common timer.
• CSS properties can be specified using relative values, such as "+10" rather than only absolute values.

Read more about jQuery 1.6 here and download the code here.