title: why does a jquery selector return an array instead of the element itself?
body: <p>If i have some mark-up that looks like: </p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;div class="box"&gt;
  &lt;/div&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>why does doing a jquery selector<code>$('.box')</code> return the element in an array? </p>
  
  <p>i get an output in the console as: </p>
  
  <pre><code>[&lt;div class="box"&gt;&lt;/div&gt;]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and not: </p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;div class="box"&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
  </code></pre>