An informative reply from Mr. Resig himself :) Thanks! I understand now. I generally use .attr to retrieve the id, class, or something like that, which isn't something that usually changes in my scripts. I mainly stick to .val() for inputs, so this definitely clears up my concerns.

I'll go through my code a bit to see if I need to make any changes, but it doesn't seem that way now that it's all more clarified for me.. Besides a couple cases where I check the state of checkboxes. Thanks again for your help, and for jQuery in general. It's made my life/job easier in a completely indescribable way. (I used to be afraid of Javascript.)