jQuery seems to have an enable function, but not a disable function. Why?

Question

Until now I was using the following to disable/enable form fields -

$('#fieldid').attr('disable','disable');
$('#fieldid').removeAttr('disable');

And that got the job done. But yesterday, I absent-mindedly typed the following to enable the field -

$('#fieldid').enable();

And it worked! I silently kicked myself for not trying the the handy 'enable'/'disable' functions built into jQuery (or so I thought), and proceeded to change the line to disable to -

$('#fieldid').disable();

And to my surprise, that did NOT work.

Am I missing something? Why is the enable() function defined but the disable() function is not? And even weirder, I could find no mention of either enable() or disable() in the jquery docs. Does anyone have any explanations?

I'm using jQuery 1.6.

Answer 1

jQuery does not support an enable() method out of the box (and the disable HTML attribute does not exist either, but that might only be a typo in your question).

Maybe you're using a plug-in that provides that feature? If that's the case, try passing false to the enable() method to disable a field:

$('#fieldid').enable(false);