Modifying CSS with inline properties

Before we jump into jQuery effects, a quick look at CSS is in order. In previous chapters, we have been modifying a document's appearance by defining styles for classes in a separate stylesheet and then adding or removing those classes with jQuery. Typically, this is the preferred process for injecting CSS into HTML because it respects the stylesheet's role in dealing with the presentation of a page. However, there may be times when we need to apply styles that haven't been or can't easily be defined in a stylesheet. Fortunately, jQuery offers the .css() method for such occasions.

This method acts as both a getter and a setter. To get the value of a single style property, we simply pass the name of the property as a string and get a string in return. To get the value of multiple style properties, we can pass the property names as an array of strings to get an object of property-value pairs in return. Multiword property names, such as backgroundColor can...