2) Do you really need jQuery there? You seem to be using it only for the html method, and including 93K extra JS instead of just using innerHTML seems a bit overkill.
It checks for the case that .innerHTML setting is not supported (I think that was for certain versions of IE) and switches to using appendChild(). I think that that small oversight is somewhat reasonable justification for using a wrapper that abstracts away the browser differences, although it can be argued that once someone understands the differences, they could just add the use cases to their code.