What's the purpose of a leading colon in a jQuery selector?

Question

I\'ve starting using the Wijmo toolkit, and came across quite a few example selectors similar to this in their documentation pages:

$(\":input[type=\'radio\'         


        

Answer 1

The :input selector basically selects all form controls(input, textarea, select and button elements) where as input selector selects all the elements by tag name input.

Since radio button is a form element and also it uses input tag so they both can be used to select radio button. However both approaches differ the way they find the elements and thus each have different performance benefits.