>>23
I love your straw man.
What? There is no straw man. In fact, you are the only one that continues to throw personal insults, in particular toward developers using jQuery, but toward me as well. $() is a wrapper for the Sizzle selector engine. Furthermore (and this should be unnecessary for me to state, but I will for the sake of posterity), it does not return a DOM object, but a jQuery object, which allows you to chain calls to the jQuery API. Again, not at all the same as document.getElementById(). You've let this be a cornerstone to your argument that jQuery is needless and redundant, and yet your assertion is flat-out incorrect.
ALREADY IN THE LANGUAGE SPECIFICATION
Wrong again. Douglas Crawford has stated that the various DOM libraries demonstrate functionality that should be in the language specification, but is missing. He also speaks about innovations resulting from the varying development paths of the different browsers that should be included in the spec, and points to the difficulty in having W3C develop the API spec while ECMA develops the language spec
1.
They both have cross platform (or cross browser) issues
Of completely different kinds. I think jQuery is a good solution to the cross-platform browser problem in Javascript.
You mention that C developers don't use libraries like jQuery, but then assert that this is not because the languages are different. This is a contradiction; the difference between the languages is absolutely a proper part of what you're trying to argue. The prototype model lends itself very well to lightweight object inheritance. jQuery is only 24k, less if you use gzip. That's less than a typical content-sized jpeg.
jQuery isn't an extension to Javascript like C++ isn't an extension to C.
jQuery is a Javascript library, to be included with other Javascript projects. C++ is a programming language with its own committee that is developed independently of C, that necessitates its own spec and compiler. This comparison is completely nonsensical.
jQuery is a reusable library that makes bugs easier to maintain and complicated dynamic DOM manipulation easier to execute. Do you suggest that developers should be rewriting their own animation code every time they want to make something fade in and out, and add extra time to their production schedule to test for cross-browser consistency? jQuery code is easier to maintain. It brings down lines of code by a significant margin, and makes sometimes arcane javascript code more legible. Take your
isArray(), for example -- which no one said you're required to use. Which one is more legible?
if (jQuery.isArray(array)) { or if (Object.prototype.toString.call(array) === '[Object Array]) {'
[/code]? Which one will compress better when run through a minifier? You've yet to make a concrete argument as to what it is precisely about jQuery that causes performance to suffer, whereas there are plenty of arguments as to what makes jQuery beneficial for developers.
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References:
1. Javascript: The Good Parts, Google Tech Talk.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQVTIJBZook