[jQuery] Auto Selecting Navigation

[fx]

Hello all, and thanks for making this available.

I am trying to add a class to my menu for the page it is currently on.
I followed this example: 
http://docs.jquery.com/Tutorials:Auto-Selecting_Navigation

But I am not able to make it work at all.

Here is my HTML:
------------------------------------------------------------
<ul id="mainNav">
    <li><a href="/product"><span>Product</span></a></li>
    <li><a href="/blog"><span>News &amp; Events</span></a></li>
    <li><a href="/support"><span>Support</span></a></li>
    <li><a href="/locator"><span>Dealer Locator</span></a></li>
    <li><a href="/about-2xl"><span>About</span></a></li>
</ul>
------------------------------------------------------------
To make the nav element highlighted, the list item must have a class
of 'hover' like this '<li class="hover">...'


And here is my jQuery:
------------------------------------------------------------
var path = location.pathname.substring(1);
if ( path )
    $('#mainNav a...@href$="' + path + '"]').parent().attr('class',
'hover');
------------------------------------------------------------
For the page /support for example, alert(path) would say 'support'.

The script is not applying any CSS to the list elements. I tried
different combinations, tried to add a class to the a element by
removing parent(), but nothing is triggering.

Please help.

Thanks,

Francois