title: jQuery backgroundColor animation
body: <p>I have a DIV with a link and a SPAN.</p>
  
  <p>When clicking the link, it renders a list of items by using AJAX. When an item is clicked, the content of the SPAN is changed.</p>
  
  <p>I want to highlight this change, by setting the background-color of the DIV to green, and animating it back to white using jQuery.</p>
  
  <pre><code>  var originalColor = elementToUpdate.parentNode.style.backgroundColor;
    elementToUpdate.style.backgroundColor = 'green'; //lastSender.style.color;
    jQuery(elementToUpdate.id).animate({ backgroundColor: '#ffffff' }, 1000);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The background of the SPAN is changed to green on the 2nd line, but the 3rd line doesn't do anything. No errors, or changes what so ever...</p>
  
  <p>Any ideas?</p>
  
  <hr>
  
  <p><strong>Edit:</strong> As noted by Ted Naleid in a comment below:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Also note that you have to have the
    color animations plugin installed for
    this to work
    (<a href="http://plugins.jquery.com/project/color" rel="noreferrer">http://plugins.jquery.com/project/color</a>),
    if you don't have it installed, jQuery
    can't animate colors, only numeric
    properties (at least as of 1.3.1).</p>
  </blockquote>