http://api.jquery.com/jQuery/ states that "As of jQuery 1.4, the second argument to jQuery() can accept a map consisting of a superset of the properties that can be passed to the .attr() method."

The problem is that if the first argument (the HTML) already has a text, the second argument (the attribute map) will be ignored. I.e. $("<a>text</a>", {href: "http://jquery.com"}) won't add the href attribute.

// works as expected
$("<a>link 1</a>").attr({href: "http://link1.com", class: "red"}).appendTo("body");
    
// doesn't create any attributes
$("<a>link 2</a>", {href: "http://api.jquery.com/jQuery/", class: "red"}).appendTo("body");

// works as expected
$("<a>", {text: "link 3", href: "http://api.jquery.com/jQuery/", class: "red"}).appendTo("body");