.appendTo and HTML literals

Question

element.appendTo('<td>').appendTo('<tr>').appendTo('#ordersList')

Is this supposed to put the element inside a new td element, inside a new tr element inside the #ordersList element (was a table)?

Because I was just getting the naked element inside #ordersList with no wrapping tr/td.

This old site I was trying to troubleshoot seems to be using jQuery 1.4.1 - in case this is a known bug.

Answer 1

appendTo() returns the element you're operating on, so what you're actually doing is;

1. Adding your element to a newly-created td.
2. Detaching the element from the td and adding it to a newly created tr.
3. Detaching it from the tr and attaching it to #ordersList

What would work would be something like this;

$('<td></td>').appendTo($('<tr></tr>')​​​​​​​​​.appendTo('#ordersList')).append(element);

... which sucks for readability.