jQuery selectors are powerful and simple to use, until you have attribute
values (including ids and classes) that have funny characters. I wrote a plugin
adds a simple function $.escape that will escape any special characters.
For example if I have a string s that contains an id but I’m not sure that
all of the characters are safe I can use $('#'+$.escape(s)) to find the
element with that id. If I want to find all of the links to
http://ianloic.com/ I can do $('a[href='+$.escape('http://ianloic.com/')+']')

The first release is here. I don’t know that there will be any more releases – this is a pretty damn simple plugin.