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Yes, you can do that:

$('.obj').get(0).key = 'value';

or

$('.obj').get(0)['key'] = 'value'

Though it's better to use .data():

$('.obj').data('key', 'value');

Yes, you can do that:

$('.obj').get(0).key = 'value';

or

$('.obj').get(0)['key'] = 'value'

Though it's better to use .data():

$('.obj').data('key', 'value');

Tips

1. You can chain multiple calls, like this:

$('.obj').css('color', 'red').data('key', 'value');

2. You can pass an object to .css():

$('.obj').css({
 'width': 100,
 'height': 100
});

3. If you don't change other CSS properties, you can use .width()and .height() to set and get an element's width:

HTML

<div id='box'></div>

CSS

#box {
 width: 200px;
 height: 100px;
}

JavaScript

var $box = $('#box');
// 200x100
alert( $box.width() + 'x' + $box.height() );

4. You may have noticed in the previous example that I saved a reference to $('#box') in a variable. There are some cases when you can't use chaining, like this:

var $box = $('#box');
setTimeout(function() {
 $box.animate({ 'width': 100 }, 100);
}, 1000);
setTimeout(function() {
 $box.animate({ 'height': 200 }, 100);
}, 1000);

If you have to do that, always save a reference to the element – that's called caching. Otherwise jQuery would have to search for it multiple times.