Jquery return element html instead of content

I have something like this

<ul>
<li class="aclass" id="a">content</li>
<li class="aclass" id="b">content</li>
<li class="aclass" id="c">content</li>
<li class="aclass" id="d">content</li>
<li class="aclass" id="e"&开发者_开发百科gt;content</li>
<li class="aclass" id="f">content</li>
</ul>

I have code like

$(".aclass").live("mousedown",function() {

alert($this.html());

});

This will alert the content, what I would like to do is alert the entire element like

<li class="aclass" id="f">content</li>

I've tried $(this).parent() but that returns the whole UL

alert($(this).clone().wrap('<div/>').parent().html());

alert($('<div/>').append($(this).clone()).html());

http://jsfiddle.net/keegan3d/nfEyQ/

To get the html-code of a DOM-Node you can use the property outerHTML

var html = document.getElementById('someId').outerHTML;

this sadly doesnt work in firefox. But you can use XMLSerializer to achieve the same result. Like this

var elm = document.getElementById('someId');
var xmls = new XMLSerializer();
var html = xmls.serializeToString(elm);

in your jQuery-code this might look something like this:

$(".aclass").live("mousedown",function() {
  alert( this.outerHTML || new XMLSerializer().serializeToString(this)  );
});