You might not need jQuery • Hacker News Board

Re: You might not need jQuery

#311

Post by dingdingdang » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 11:15 AM UTC

BESebastian wrote: post #291

ivanca wrote: post #195

>post-IE8, browsers are pretty easy to deal with on their own. False: - CSS browser prefixes are automatically inserted by jQuery - Many jQuery selectors don't exist in the CSS selector specification - Looks really really ugly and that makes it hard to read for you and other coders. var pairs = $(".form").not(".old").serialize(); /* without jQuery */ var pairs = [].slice.call(document.querySelectorAll(".form")); var…

> Looks really really ugly and that makes it hard to read for you and other coders. This point might have been better made if you hadn't intentionally structured it to be as unreadable as possible, and also shoved in a few lines of comments to pad it out and make it look bigger than it needs to be. Not a very honest example at all, considering native JS can be as readable as you want to make it. > So be kind with you…

> Not a very honest example at all, considering native JS can be as readable as you want to make it.

Can you make an honest version of the example? (genuine interest, no sarcasm)

Re: You might not need jQuery

#312

Post by wyuenho » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 11:17 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #302

wyuenho wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah no. First of all, you should always know which platform you target and what works and what don't work on those platforms, even if you are using jQuery. jQuery is not perfect. Platform specific corner cases are still exposed to you. What if you need several polyfills? Drop them in too. You should always know what browser feature you are using. The same argument goes for using libraries. What if you need more than j…

> You should always know what browser feature you are using. Why? If I just drop jQuery in and treat that as my API baseline, what do I lose? A little performance, a few hundred kilobytes' download (almost certainly cached from a CDN anyway). And it frees me up from remembering a bunch of corner cases and keeping track of a bunch of implementation details, letting me focus my attention on more important things.

The point is, jQuery doesn't free you up from remembering lower level details, they are still there in your face all the time, especially when it comes to event delegation and handling. jQuery also doesn't help you with CSS, which is even more of a pain than DOM inconsistencies. The whole point of polyfills is to patch browser incompatibilities, often times without losing any performance to newer browsers, so you can provide the best experience to half the people in the world on newer browsers and a mediocre experience to the rest, instead of a mediocre experience for everyone. If you care about attention to details, you should understand what your browser is doing. Polyfills are things that you only have to learn once and drop in once. Isn't providing a good experience one of the more important things?

Re: You might not need jQuery

#313

Post by mokkol » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 11:19 AM UTC

latj wrote: post #116

__david__ wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the point is that many libraries use about 1% of jQuery. That hardly justifies pulling in the entire thing. A personal anecdote: I recently un-jQueried a little piece of code and ended up with only a couple lines of extra code. Certain parts of jQuery are heavenly and well worth it, but really basic usage doesn't actually save that much. $("#something") instead of document.getElementById("something") is not…

I agree with the overall message- you should be thoughtful with all your dependencies. You should only add complexity when it makes sense. However, the author goes beyond just selector vs. getElementById(). Does the way the author uses XMLHttpRequest work in other browsers the way it works in IE? I honestly dont even remember anymore. How about the code for fade? I never even knew the details of this feature. And I'm…

For fading, I recommend just adding or removing a class and let css transitions do the job. If you dont mind it not working in IE8 of course

Re: You might not need jQuery

#314

Post by simons » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 11:43 AM UTC

mokkol wrote: post #313

latj wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the overall message- you should be thoughtful with all your dependencies. You should only add complexity when it makes sense. However, the author goes beyond just selector vs. getElementById(). Does the way the author uses XMLHttpRequest work in other browsers the way it works in IE? I honestly dont even remember anymore. How about the code for fade? I never even knew the details of this feature. And I'm…

For fading, I recommend just adding or removing a class and let css transitions do the job. If you dont mind it not working in IE8 of course

and IE9: http://caniuse.com/css-transitions.

Pedantry aside, your point stands, CSS transitions can use the GPU and degrade gracefully.

Re: You might not need jQuery

#315

Post by scotty79 » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 11:54 AM UTC

Next up: You might not need warm water.

Re: You might not need jQuery

#316

Post by hesselink » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 12:02 PM UTC

One thing I haven't seen mentioned in this thread, is that you can create custom builds of jQuery that only include some of the functionality: https://github.com/jquery/jquery#how-to-build-your-own-jquer...

Re: You might not need jQuery

#317

Post by fatiherikli » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 12:04 PM UTC

There is a mistake in Matches section. The `is` method is not equal to `===` operator.

Re: You might not need jQuery

#318

Post by jgillich » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 12:14 PM UTC

iagooar wrote: post #294

latj wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

node express is the rails ;)

Node express is Sinatra. There is nothing even close to Rails in the JS world, Meteor is getting closer every day, though.

Well, there is Sails.js[1]

[1]: http://sailsjs.org

Re: You might not need jQuery

#319

Post by talmand » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 3:22 PM UTC

__david__ wrote: post #102

efuquen wrote: post #57

No, please no. If size is an issue for some reason or you want to have no dependencies you can use something like http://zeptojs.com/ and just embed everything in one minified file. If you do things right only the functions you are actually using will get placed in there as well. Do not reinvent the wheel to solve problems that can't be solved in much cleaner and nicer ways. Managing dependencies can be annoying, but…

I believe the point is that many libraries use about 1% of jQuery. That hardly justifies pulling in the entire thing. A personal anecdote: I recently un-jQueried a little piece of code and ended up with only a couple lines of extra code. Certain parts of jQuery are heavenly and well worth it, but really basic usage doesn't actually save that much. $("#something") instead of document.getElementById("something") is not…

$('#something') and document.getElementById('something') are not quite the same thing because of what you'll do after you create that reference.

Re: You might not need jQuery

#320

Post by talmand » Fri, Jan 31, 2014, 3:29 PM UTC

julien_c wrote: post #295

hacknat wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think that a page that loads jQuery but doesn't use most of it incurs a performance penalty? I'll grant there are a few initializations and dom checks that jQuery does, but it probably blocks for all of 20ms.

...which is significant.

20ms is significant?