A selector is used in jQuery to select DOM elements from a DOM document. That document is, in most cases, the DOM document present in all browsers, but can also be a XML document received via AJAX.
The selectors are a composition of CSS and custom additions. XPath selectors are available as a plugin.
All selectors available in jQuery are documented on the Selectors API page.
There are lot of plugins that leverage jQuery's selectors in other ways. The validation plugin accepts a selector to specify a dependency, whether an input is required or not:
emailrules: {
required: "#email:filled"
}
This would make a checkbox with name "emailrules" required only if the user entered an email address in the email field, selected via its id, filtered via a custom selector ":filled" that the validation plugin provides.
If Selector is specified as the type of an argument, it accepts everything that the jQuery constructor accepts, eg. Strings, Elements, Lists of Elements.
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