Comment by benediktwerner

jQuery, along with a number of similar attempts and more single-item-focused polyfills¹ was as much about DOM inconsistencies as JS ones. It was also about making dealing with the DOM more convenient² even where it was already consistent between commonly used browsers.

DOM manipulation of that sort is JS dependent, of course, but I think considering language features and the environment, like the DOM, to be separate-but-related concerns is valid. There were less kitchen-sink-y libraries that only concentrated on language features or specific DOM features. Some may even consider a few parts in a third section: the standard library, though that feature set might be rather small (not much more than the XMLHTTPRequest replacement/wrappers?) to consider its own thing.

> For stuff which didn't need JS at all, there also shouldn't be much need for JQuery.

That much is mostly true, as it by default didn't do anything to change non-scripted pages. Some polyfills for static HTML (for features that were inconsistent, or missing entirely in, usually, old-IE) were implemented as jQuery plugins though.

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[1] Though I don't think they were called that back then, the term coming later IIRC.

[2] Method chaining³, better built-in searching and filtering functions⁴, and so forth.

[3] This divides opinions a bit though was generally popular, some other libraries did the same, others tried different approaches.

[4] Which we ended up coding repeatedly in slightly different ways when needed otherwise.