Is there any difference between $('.className > button') and $('.className').children('button')?

Question

In jQuery is there any difference between

$('.className > button')

and

$('.className').children('button')

Or are these just alternate syntaxes to get the same thing?

Answer 1

Not in terms of what you'll actually end up with, but the first one can be offloaded in its entirety to the browser's built-in CSS selection engine, whereas the second one requires jQuery to do more work and involves more object creation and cleanup. It's unlikely to matter unless you're doing this with a lot of elements in, say, a mousemove handler, though, if even then...