Why won't this function give me the name of the element it's bound to?
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I have an some html elements defined with class="tab".

And in my jquery file, I have defined the following function:

      $('.tab').mouseleave( function() {
        alert($(this).name);
      });

When I trigger the mouseleave, for the element of class "tab", with the name "Contact", I do get the alert - but it says "undefined". I was expecting to see "Contact".

What does $(this) give me - does it actually give me the DOM element?

NB. Ultimately, I want to be able to work out on what side ( north, south, east or west ) the mouse left the element. So I'm doing this alert thing to ensure that I actually have access to the width and height of that element. So far, I don't seem to have access to that info.