what is traversing

Hi Muhammad,

Traversing is all about selection. When you need to traverse, you need to figure out how to get somewhere, or more specifically, how to identify something in a particular area. There's lots of ways to identify, or get to the same spot. You can use IDs, class names, parents, children, etc.

Manipulation is about access and change, and comes after traversing (in thought, but not always in code). Once you figure out how to identify a specific item in your html, then you can manipulate it.

Let's say you had a paragraph inside a div, and you wanted to change the text in that paragraph:

<div id="gothamDiv">
    <p>I'm Batman</p>
</div>

First, you need to traverse to that specific paragraph. There are many ways to do this, but since our div happens to have an ID of "gothamDiv", we'll use that. Don't forget, because we want the paragraph inside we need to include a space and a paragraph selector "p".

$("#gothamDiv p")

Alright, we've traversed, and identified the paragraph we want in our specific Div. Now comes the manipulation, where we access, and in this case alter the text. Again, there's more than one way to do this, but we'll use the method ".text()". Remember, with ".text()", you can retrieve text or set text, depending on whether or not you pass an argument. We want to change the text, so we'll pass an argument that contains our new string.

$("#gothamDiv p").text("I am the night");

Traversing doesn't always come before manipulation, but it helps for the purpose of understanding. For instance, if we wanted to pass an argument containing the text from another paragraph, we would have to traverse 'after' manipulating. Just remember, Traversing gets you where you want to be, and Manipulation does what you want to do.

Hope this helps. :)