Great news: jQuery 1.2 is out, and the heavily-awaited jQuery UI (an "official" replacement to Interface) will be out on Sunday.

Be sure to have a read of the jQuery 1.2 release notes, but here are a few highlights that I can't wait to use:

• Partial .load()

  If you want to load a whole web page with Ajax, but only want to cut out a portion of the page and stick it in to an element on your page, you can now do this:

  $('#stats').load('same_page.php #stats');
  

  This will make it really easy to refresh an element on the page without needing to change the server-side logic.

• New Traversing Features

  Traversing and selecting remain the most powerful features in jQuery, and it'll be great to be able to use .andSelf() to include the original set when traversing, and .prevAll()/.nextAll() to select all the siblings to one side or the other.

• New Effect Features

  There are a ton of new Effects features, but my favourite is probably .stop(), allowing us to finally stop animations. Together with the new :animated selector, it's trivial to stop all ongoing animations at once:

  $(':animated').stop();
  

  Some of the other Effects features have a lot of potential, like being able to use percents or animating by a relative amount (eg. add 100px).

  Extremely powerful is the new ability to write extensible animations. I assume they did this to ease in the development of jQuery UI, but this allows all of us to harness the power of jQuery animations to do anything we want! Okay I'm starting to drool...

Oh, one more thing. If you're used to creating elements in jQuery like this:

var link = $('<a>');

then you need to stop using invalid HTML and either make it XHTML compliant or add a closing tag, otherwise it will break in Internet Explorer. This is true since jQuery version 1.1.4, and I've had to make a lot of changes in my code as a result.

Now any of the following is okay:

// okay, XHTML-style
var xhtmllink = $('<a/>');

// also okay, valid HTML style
var htmllink = $('<a></a>');