jQuery's built in 'data methods' are great for storing tidbits of information into the nodes themselves. However tryign to find nodes in the dom containing certain data is not so easy, in fact, its rather messy $.filter(...) as far as jquery usually goes.

This is a feature request to add selector $(...) support for jquery's data methods.

$("div[:data.foo.bar=12]");

There by allowing one to query for all divs whose's data['foo']['bar'] value is 12.

Please note as of this time, this is not implementable via plugins as it requires an actual patch to the core javascript. It is possible this might be best done if/after Sizzle is implemented.

Discussion on the dev-jquery mailing list can be found here: http://groups.google.com/group/jquery-dev/browse_thread/thread/d74e5a88b9649d24?hl=en