Awesome site with clear message. +1
You might not need jQuery
31–40 of 360 posts
Re: You might not need jQuery
#32So, uh, what will I gain by ditching jQuery?
I will lose a beautiful API with a simple, terse and familiar syntax. I will have to work with an ugly, inconsistent and loquacious API, which has no guarantee of being cross-browser (or accounting for various browser quirks).
And for what? I doubt 81 KB would make much difference to 99.9% of my visitors.
As for performance -- it makes sense to rewrite bottlenecks in pure highly-optimized JS. But to write vanilla JS from scratch, without even knowing whether you'd need that performance boost is a pure waste of time.
UPD: it has been pointed out that this webpage is directed at developers of JS libraries. In this case, all these points are valid, but the title, then, seems to be either misleading (as in "link-bait" misleading) or a plain truism.
Re: You might not need jQuery
#33My colleagues and I learnt that lesson the hard way. We are working on a WYSIWYG editor (Aloha-Editor) and the first version did depend on jQuery (and jQuery UI for that matter). That caused a lot of trouble for people integrating the editor in their websites, especially if they were already using jQuery. For our particular case we really didn't need it, as it's just as easy to say .getAttribute() instead of .attr(), and we didn't use selectors much, if at all. Effort is underway to get rid of the dependency from the core library in the next major release.
Re: You might not need jQuery
#34I understand the desire for people to make pages like this (this isn't the first), but the examples are not completely honest with themselves, in my opinion. One of the biggest benefits jQuery introduces is the concept of treating single selections and multiple selections identically. While using jQuery, I can emit a $(".class").hide() call, which will apply to all elements with the matching class. Simple and elegant…
You're certainly right. Did you see that the page specifically targets people who make javascript libraries? The page is arguing that when possible, libraries shouldn't depend on jquery, and shows how to do that for a few common idioms. Since a library is written once and used in many different places, it's worth going to a little more effort to make it more flexible.
That sounds more like an argument for picking a canonical version of jQuery that can be cached aggressively, rather than everybody shipping a probably-buggy re-implementation of the 25% of jQuery they need.
Re: You might not need jQuery
#35I understand the desire for people to make pages like this (this isn't the first), but the examples are not completely honest with themselves, in my opinion. One of the biggest benefits jQuery introduces is the concept of treating single selections and multiple selections identically. While using jQuery, I can emit a $(".class").hide() call, which will apply to all elements with the matching class. Simple and elegant…
This is actually a great example of the purpose of the site. Since IE8, browsers have supported a native 'sizzle-style' element querying syntax: http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/#finding_elements IE9 and later also support a native each. You are correct however that you'd have to use Array.prototype.each.call, because the NodeList is not a real array.
Resig on document.querySelectorAll: http://ejohn.org/blog/thoughts-on-queryselectorall/
Good SO discussion on this topic: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11503534/jquery-vs-docume...
Re: You might not need jQuery
#36"You might not need Ruby on Rails. Use C to rewrite tons of shit you need." Use jQuery please. Rewriting jQuery methods with vanilla js usually turns out to be a hack job that is buggy and ugly. Just use jQuery.
This is exactly what we're trying to combat. For modern browsers, in many cases, it's just not true. There are a few utility methods that are tricky to replace, but you really shouldn't be including jQuery only for it's utility methods.
Re: You might not need jQuery
#37It's odd, but after reading everything and the examples at the end, I feel we need jQuery more than ever. Kind the opposite of the OP is stating. Great post though.
Re: You might not need jQuery
#38I understand the desire for people to make pages like this (this isn't the first), but the examples are not completely honest with themselves, in my opinion. One of the biggest benefits jQuery introduces is the concept of treating single selections and multiple selections identically. While using jQuery, I can emit a $(".class").hide() call, which will apply to all elements with the matching class. Simple and elegant…
You're certainly right. Did you see that the page specifically targets people who make javascript libraries? The page is arguing that when possible, libraries shouldn't depend on jquery, and shows how to do that for a few common idioms. Since a library is written once and used in many different places, it's worth going to a little more effort to make it more flexible.
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Re: You might not need jQuery
#39You might not need jQuery 1.x.
You might be able to use jQuery 2.x instead, which is smaller, faster, and drops support for IE8 and below.
Re: You might not need jQuery
#40"You might not need Ruby on Rails. Use C to rewrite tons of shit you need." Use jQuery please. Rewriting jQuery methods with vanilla js usually turns out to be a hack job that is buggy and ugly. Just use jQuery.
That's a really bad analogy.
People don't use Ruby because C's standard library works differently across different platforms.
This isn't about "rewriting jQuery methods with vanilla js". It's about using the built-in, native, vastly more performant methods that come standard on modern browsers.