Debunking .delay()

Question

Please see Matt's answer to this question. He says that .delay() is confusing to most people, and he gives the following example:

$('#foo').hide().delay(2000).slideDown().text('Hello!').delay(2000).hide();

See here for the fiddle. Could somebody explain the behaviour of that line of code?

Answer 1

Only certain parts of jQuery's code can be pushed off with .delay() -- hide() and text() are not a part of that group.

So basically what the code is doing is (not really doing this, this is just a sketch):

setTimeout(function(){
    $('#foo').slideDown();
}, 2000);
$('#foo').hide().text('Hello!').hide();

So that is why the slideDown() seems to happen last.