title: When and why to check if an element exists with jQuery
body: <p>I recently wrote a small script that made a simple show/hide manipulation to an unordered list.</p>
  
  <p>From my understanding, jQuery will only execute a function if the element in question exists (therefore if it's 'true'). So there is no practical reason in doing a check to see if the length of the element is bigger than 0, if it has a parent node which is body and so on. Correct?</p>
  
  <p>If the above is accurate, when would actually such a check be helpful? </p>
  
  <p><a href="http://jsbin.com/ehicik/1/edit" rel="nofollow">http://jsbin.com/ehicik/1/edit</a></p>