[jquery] How to create a DOM node as an object?

Try this:

var div = $('<div></div>').addClass('bar').text('bla');
var li = $('<li></li>').attr('id', '1234');
li.append(div);

$('body').append(li);

Obviously, it doesn't make sense to append a li to the body directly. Basically, the trick is to construct the DOM elementr tree with $('your html here'). I suggest to use CSS modifiers (.text(), .addClass() etc) as opposed to making jquery parse raw HTML, it will make it much easier to change things later.