appending html string with .append() does not work?
<p>I am rather new to jquery, so please bear with me.  I have created an HTML page containing a number of hooks to which I want to append new elements.  Appending a string works as expected:</p>

<pre><code>$(theParentNode).append ("blurb1");
</code></pre>

<p>But appending HTML does not:</p>

<pre><code>$(theParentNode).append ("&lt;b&gt;blurb2&lt;/b&gt;");
</code></pre>

<p>When I check the resulting DOM there are no children of the parent node.  And finally, when
I try this:</p>

<pre><code>$(theParentNode).append ("blurb1");
$(theParentNode).append ("&lt;b&gt;blurb2&lt;/b&gt;");
$(theParentNode).append ("blurb3");
</code></pre>

<p>only the first child node shows up in the parent's list of children.  A final experiment involved adding a "span" instead of a "b" element.  In that case I get an error from jquery: div is null, line 6443 of jquery-1.7.2.js</p>

<p>I must be overlooking something very basic, but still it's difficult why it doesn't work since append is supposed to take html strings...  Thanx for any help!</p>
