While I was working on a jQuery UI plugin I'm writing, in my haste to get it going I made a simple mistake, which was forgetting the fundamental principle of how jQuery works with it's selectors. My aim was to create a new Image instance, apply my jQuery UI plugin to it, which wraps that image in a DIV and then add the DIV to the DOM.

My plugin id is 'photoboxr' and so my code looked something like this...


Seems simple enough but nothing worked and instead I got a lot of flickering when my web page loaded. I was confused at first.

Then, I realised that I was doing this: $('img'). The intent was of course to create a new Image node, but the reality of running that was to select all existing 'img' elements in my web page. The rest of the code then applied my plugin to all those images and hence caused the flickering and the same repeating image all over the place.

That was a big oops! In case my explanation above is not clear, jQuery was simply interpreting my code by running its Element Selector.

The fix is easy, create a new Image HTML object and pass that to jQuery instead. Derp. The code now became..


After that everything worked perfectly! Simple mistake, but easy to fall for.



-i