Comment by jraph
1 day ago
I agree that DOM lists not being real arrays is a pita. I can understand why for getElementBy* methods which return live lists, but it's less clear for those methods returning fixed lists.
But to me, these are minor inconveniences and habits. A thin wrapper can get you there easily if you care enough. I personally dislike this array/element confusion that jQuery adds.
> A thin wrapper can get you there easily if you care enough
But that's more and more friction. A wrapper here, a wrapper there, and if here, a try/catch there. At one point you are reinventing significant chunks of jQuery
jQuery's scope is broad¹. It has at least:
- a plugin system
- its custom selector parser (because it had it before querySelector and is not totally compatible with it)
- its abstraction to iron out browser differences (old IE vs standard, notably) that's not relevant anymore
- its own custom (DOM) event management
- its implementation of methods that are now standard (ajax & trim for instance)
I recognize that the DOM API could be better, and comes with friction. Back then, ironing out the browser differences and its selector feature were killer features of jQuery. Today, I do not think the quirks of the DOM API warrant importing a library like jQuery.
¹ but indeed, very lightweight compared to modern frameworks like Angular, React and Vue, with all the ecosystem which comes with each of them (react-router, redux, etc).
quack quack quack... why reinvent the wheel, why not adopt a good, working system, why the need to do everything in a complicated way? give resig a big black suitcase full of money and implement his complexity reduction framework called jQuery into the standard. And fire the standards guys in the process, because what they do is shit. they most presumably never worked extensively with the shit they produce.
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