Thank you for jQuery, it's an ingenious library : )

I frequently use jQuery to add markup to a page:

$('#foo').before('<div>bar</div>');

However I now need to access the dom element which jQuery constructs (I'm building a YUI button by passing the dom element to the button constructor).

I wish there were a way to access the dom element which jQuery constructs. For now, I use:

var bar = jQuery.clean('<div>bar</div>');

$('#foo').before(bar);

var button = new YAHOO.widget.Button(bar);

• however I guess clean is not a documented jQuery function, and so may disappear at any point?

So again, unless there's a better way to accomplish this, I whish jQuery exposed the function it uses to construct a dom element from an html string.

Also, I guess when ECMAScript for XML (E4X) is widely supported, I could use that, but until then, jQuery's clean function is the best I can think of...

Thanks again and best wishes, Jack