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You Don't Need JQuery

blog.garstasio.com

21–30 of 201 posts

Re: You Don't Need JQuery

#22
post #7

You can basically sum up this entire rather ridiculous site with "Yes, you don't need jQuery, you can just use the built-in methods, but using jQuery is generally more pleasant, more consistent, and involves less typing". One particularly egregious example from the site: $('#foo').removeClass('bold'); vs. document.getElementById('foo').className = document.getElementById('foo').className.replace(/^bold$/, ''); The au…

.classlist() [1] is coming [2]. It'll allow you to do: document.getElementById('foo').classList.remove("bold"); Sure, it's still more verbose. But a lot of what jQuery does is slowly being obsoleted by better native javascript apis. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element.cla... [2] http://caniuse.com/#feat=classlist

And in 5-10 years, we'll be able to use it.

Re: You Don't Need JQuery

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.classlist() [1] is coming [2]. It'll allow you to do: document.getElementById('foo').classList.remove("bold"); Sure, it's still more verbose. But a lot of what jQuery does is slowly being obsoleted by better native javascript apis. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element.cla... [2] http://caniuse.com/#feat=classlist

`$(".foo").removeClass("bold")` becomes the wonderfully concise [].map.call(document.querySelectorAll(".foo"), function(node) { node.classlist.remove("bold"); })

This may seem anecdotal, but I can tell you from writing a lot of non-jQueryified code that with modern browsers, applying classes to dozens of elements dynamically can be an anti-pattern. 99% of the time, when doing something which previously would have required that, I can use a single class on a parent element.

Re: You Don't Need JQuery

#24
post #7

You can basically sum up this entire rather ridiculous site with "Yes, you don't need jQuery, you can just use the built-in methods, but using jQuery is generally more pleasant, more consistent, and involves less typing". One particularly egregious example from the site: $('#foo').removeClass('bold'); vs. document.getElementById('foo').className = document.getElementById('foo').className.replace(/^bold$/, ''); The au…

.classlist() [1] is coming [2]. It'll allow you to do: document.getElementById('foo').classList.remove("bold"); Sure, it's still more verbose. But a lot of what jQuery does is slowly being obsoleted by better native javascript apis. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element.cla... [2] http://caniuse.com/#feat=classlist

Sure, the native APIs are slowly catching up, and classList is definitely a useful one.

You'd better hope that there actually is an element with an ID of "foo", though, otherwise your example will throw an exception. The last time I pointed this out here, there was some disagreement as to whether jQuery's behaviour is actually desirable. I think it is, but I'm probably biased from writing too much jQuery over the years.

Re: You Don't Need JQuery

#25
post #7

You can basically sum up this entire rather ridiculous site with "Yes, you don't need jQuery, you can just use the built-in methods, but using jQuery is generally more pleasant, more consistent, and involves less typing". One particularly egregious example from the site: $('#foo').removeClass('bold'); vs. document.getElementById('foo').className = document.getElementById('foo').className.replace(/^bold$/, ''); The au…

I agree that's a lot nicer. But it also looks like essentially a mechanical transformation. Instead of a runtime library (whether jquery or roll-your-own), would it be possible to handle cases like that via syntactic sugar that expands at deployment time, and doesn't require shipping a library to the end-user's browser? (Or does something like that already exist? I haven't really spent any time with CoffeeScript and other compile-to-JS languages, so it's possible they already have nice syntax for this kind of thing.)

Re: You Don't Need JQuery

#26
post #7

You can basically sum up this entire rather ridiculous site with "Yes, you don't need jQuery, you can just use the built-in methods, but using jQuery is generally more pleasant, more consistent, and involves less typing". One particularly egregious example from the site: $('#foo').removeClass('bold'); vs. document.getElementById('foo').className = document.getElementById('foo').className.replace(/^bold$/, ''); The au…

.classlist() [1] is coming [2]. It'll allow you to do: document.getElementById('foo').classList.remove("bold"); Sure, it's still more verbose. But a lot of what jQuery does is slowly being obsoleted by better native javascript apis. [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element.cla... [2] http://caniuse.com/#feat=classlist

So when those new native api functions arrive, jQuery will start using them and gain some performance boost (using native vs. custom js code) while at the same time remaining backwards compatible (by doing feature detection). No one wants to write their own feature detection code so this whole page about using native apis is instead of jQuery is ridiculous.

If the point of that website was to educate people on the apis that jQuery calls under the hood, it chose a really poor name.

Re: You Don't Need JQuery

#27
I also don't need a calculator but I regularly use one to do even simple arithmetic operations, because it speeds up the operation and guarantees a certain result with given inputs.

The purpose of an SDK such as jQuery is to help a developer do common tasks without needing to write his own library. If it's used widely in the industry then even better. If it's open source, even more betterer.

Re: You Don't Need JQuery

#28
This guy's argument is strikingly similar to that of the one made by those people who are anti-Apple, despite the fact that working with Apple products is a commonly pleasant experience, simply for the fact that they're Apple.

Just because a lot of people use something that they're not being forced to use doesn't necessarily mean that they've been "tricked" into doing so.

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