What is jQuery Unobtrusive Validation?

asp.net-mvc, javascript, jquery, unobtrusive-validation, validation

Solution

Brad Wilson has a couple great articles on unobtrusive validation and unobtrusive ajax. It is also shown very nicely in this Pluralsight video in the section on " AJAX and JavaScript".

Basically, it is simply Javascript validation that doesn't pollute your source code with its own validation code. This is done by making use of `data-` attributes in HTML.

Problem

I know what the jQuery Validation plugin is. I know the jQuery Unobtrusive Validation library was made by Microsoft and is included in the ASP.NET MVC framework. But I cannot find a single online source that explains what it is. What is the difference between the standard jQuery Validation library and the "unobtrusive" version?

Original source