temporarily removing and later reinserting a DOM element?

Question

Is there some jquery magic that will let me do the following:

[0- define some element in HTML (eg, a unchecked checkbox)]

1- update its DOM element by s

Answer 1

Six days after the question was answered jQuery released 1.4 which contains the detach method. Which does exactly what you're looking for.

var detached = $('#element').detach();
$('body').append(detached);