Clearest way to build html elements in jQuery

Question

I've seen a lot of different styles (and few different methods) of creating elements in jQuery. I was curious about the clearest way to build them, and also if any particular method is objectively better than another for any reason. Below are some examples of the styles and methods that I've seen.

var title = "Title";
var content = "Lorem ipsum";

// escaping endlines for a multi-line string
// (aligning the slashes is marginally prettier but can add a lot of whitespace)
var $element1 = $("\
    <div><h1>" + title + "</h1>\
        <div class='content'>  \
        " + content + "        \
        </div>                 \
    </div>                     \
");

// all in one
// obviously deficient
var $element2 = $("<div><h1>" + title + "</h1><div class='content'>" + content + "</div></div>");

// broken on concatenation
var $element3 = $("<div><h1>" +
                title + 
                "</h1><div class='content'>" +
                content +
                "</div></div>");

// constructed piecewise
// (I've seen this with nested function calls instead of temp variables)
var $element4 = $("<div></div>");
var $title = $("<h1></h1>").html(title);
var $content = $("<div class='content'></div>").html(content);
$element4.append($title, $content);

$("body").append($element1, $element2, $element3, $element4);

Please feel free to demonstrate any other methods/styles you might use.

Answer 1

Templates are great and if you have access to them in your project, I suggest you use them. If you're using Underscore or Lodash it's built in. In some cases however, you will need to build HTML in your code whether it's refactoring or testing. I've found that the below format is the clearest to read when that is the requirement.

Note: The HTML spec allows single OR double quotes for attributes in your markup so don't bother with all the crazy escaping.

this.$fixture = $([
  "<div>",
  "  <div class='js-alert-box'></div>",
  "  <form id='my-form-to-validate'>",
  "    <input id='login-username' name='login-username'>",
  "  </form>",
  "</div>"
].join("\n"));