Is jQuery the COBOL of the 2000s?
jQuery v4.0 Beta
121–130 of 404 posts
Re: jQuery v4.0 Beta
#122With browsers having much better support with DOM selection, why would anyone be using jQuery in 2024? Not trying to throw shade, I actually think it's cool that it's still being worked on. But I'm confused as to what the use case is.
Legacy projects? I maintain an old .NET web app that's ~15 years old and runs on jQuery. While the dream of refactoring or rewriting the entire thing using something more modern (like Web Components) is nice we're never gonna do it.
Slightly older WebForms (I know) project. New stuff gets done in vanilla or Vue, but there’s a lot of jQuery there that certainly will not be replaced without great reason.
Re: jQuery v4.0 Beta
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few years ago I dropped jQuery for plain vanilla js and I've never looked back. Native js has everything jQuery has, except for the pile of often poorly maintained half baked "plugins", that usually only do what they want to do and not much else. Yes, the vanilla selectors are more verbose, but any half decent code editor will make them just as fast to type. I don't mean to be penantic, but I don't really understan…
LMFAO every example of "modern" looks like a course in how not to design an API, etc. The jQuery examples are so clean and expressive. Imagine landing on a page like that and thinking, "hey, that 'modern' option looks good." You'll end up with 28KB (jQuery gzipped size) of just extra syntax before you're done with your app, not to mention the additional 160 hours of work. You'll likely be adding 6-700KB of React and…
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Re: jQuery v4.0 Beta
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
About optional JS: you can have that with server-side rendering plus a modern framework (like next.js or leptos). That's certainly not as simple as vanilla html and js, but totally doable.
You sure can, but it then comes to the separation of concerns. CSS-in-JS (coupling of concerns) is the preferred option.
Having CSS in a separate file feels like defining the predicates for your if statements in a separate file. With tailwind we're getting pretty close to a great solution here.
Re: jQuery v4.0 Beta
#125For those of you who are curious what drives jQuery in 2024 and beyond, you need to remember that WordPress is still more than 1/3 of the web, and the majority of installations and so many plugins critically rely on jQuery. Yes, seriously. Any advances to removing deprecated APIs or functions are great. jQuery will probably be around dominantly on the web for years to come.
I don't care what anyone says, jQuery still rocks and is so damn important and influential. You remove jQuery from every piece of software a good chunk of the all the websites stop working all around the Internet.
Re: jQuery v4.0 Beta
#126I'm consistently surprised by the commenters on HN who seem to think jQuery is just a DOM selection library, when in fact it is a widely supported, incredibly stable tool set for (yes) DOM selection, but also attribute manipulation, Ajax requests, event handling, animation, and general utility functions. What's more, where there _is_ native functionality that replaces jQuery, the API is never as fluent. For work that…
A few years ago I dropped jQuery for plain vanilla js and I've never looked back. Native js has everything jQuery has, except for the pile of often poorly maintained half baked "plugins", that usually only do what they want to do and not much else. Yes, the vanilla selectors are more verbose, but any half decent code editor will make them just as fast to type. I don't mean to be penantic, but I don't really understan…
Some of those examples aren't really equivalent. If you use that vanilla js way to show/hide, it won't restore the display property to the value it was before using hiding. It will just shift it between display: "none" and display: "". If you need something to be a display: "inline-block", the vanilla js example will lose that and break your styling.
You can modify the code to set the display property as inline-block, but now you need a different show function for every possible display value you want to restore. Or you need to build a layer of state to remember what the original value was and hey you've rewritten the jquery version.
And this is all ignoring that the jquery versions just look so much simpler to remember and are cleaner to read.
Re: jQuery v4.0 Beta
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
One website that almost always gets mentioned when people talk about jQuery today is "You might not need jQuery" ( https://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ ). That site is the best ad for jQuery I've ever seen. For almost every task it describes, the jQuery code is shorter, cleaner, and more intuitive than the vanilla "modern" JS one. And that's after almost 20 years, and I don't know how many billions of dollars invested…
This is incredible and such a great ad for jQuery. It's almost as if the creator(s) built that site ironically. So many examples are way clearer and easier in jQuery, like this one: JQUERY: $(el).toggle(); IE8+: function toggle(el) { if (el.style.display == 'none') { el.style.display = ''; } else { el.style.display = 'none'; } } Gotta love that "modern" triple attribute repetition. From: https://youmightnotneedjquery…
Toggle was a bit of a pitfall because the developer had to keep track of all the possible states prior to that line. It's easy to drop in as a function when needed in simple scripting (expanding faq sections, etc.)
Re: jQuery v4.0 Beta
#128Re: jQuery v4.0 Beta
#129For those of you who are curious what drives jQuery in 2024 and beyond, you need to remember that WordPress is still more than 1/3 of the web, and the majority of installations and so many plugins critically rely on jQuery. Yes, seriously. Any advances to removing deprecated APIs or functions are great. jQuery will probably be around dominantly on the web for years to come.
They just need to add JSX support. Half the reason people use react is because of JSX.
Fully agreed. I built a mostly vanilla JS app using a bare bones JSX lib[1] a few months ago and was surprised at how little I missed the rest of React.
Re: jQuery v4.0 Beta
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, jQuery is awesome. People have been in love with the overly complex and fancy javascript frameworks for the last 15 years or so. But jQuery doing dynamic binding to dynamically generated forms for some error states and maybe an ajax calls is literally all the javascript you need in 99% of web pages and the rest is overkill. The industry is going to move away from the complexities to React and towards more of th…
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I think your definitive comment above 'absolutely not' has tainted how people see your authoritatively spoken statements.