I'm a Systems Reliability and DevOps engineer for Netdata Inc. When not working, I enjoy studying linguistics and history, playing video games, and cooking all kinds of international cuisine.
In the old days, before Chrome and Firefox, when Internet Explorer wasn’t even a decade old, Netscape Navigator was still a major part of the browser market share, and ECMAScript 3 was the core basis for JavaScript, the DOM APIs were very different. Those differences mostly involved requiring you to manually traverse the DOM to find groups of elements that matched specific criteria. Essentially, you had to implement document.querySelector() and the various related functions yourself, and event handling was rather more complicated (and less consistent).
Because of how crappy the DOM APIs were early on, one of the big things at the time was to write libraries to make them better (as is normal for programmers to do). jQuery was one of the most successful such libraries (Prototype is another early example that held on for a long time), providing both an easy way to select elements or groups of elements using CSS selectors (this functionality was earth-shattering when it was first implemented, though I do not recall if jQuery was where it first came into being) and much nicer event handling, as well as some nice utility functions for things like JS-powered animations or AJAX networking functionality.
Over time, a significant percentage of the functionality in jQuery has either been added to the DOM APIs (most significantly including the element selection functionality and much, but not all, of the event handling improvements) or implemented in other ways in the usual web tool stack (for example, many of the basic parts of the animations are now in CSS). However, jQuery has hung on due to the huge amount of other things that depend on jQuery (for example, Bootstrap only got rid of their dependency on jQuery with Bootstrap 5 a few months ago).
How’s it going, I'm a Adam, a Full-Stack Engineer, actively searching for work. I'm all about JavaScript. And Frontend but don't let that fool you - I've also got some serious Backend skills.
Location
City of Bath, UK 🇬🇧
Education
10 plus years* active enterprise development experience and a Fine art degree 🎨
jQuery is this old thing that a lot of people used to use (a few still do). It is a library wrote in JavaScript, it is nothing special but became so popular because it made JavaScript easier to write back in 2012. It has no specific purpose but it is particularly good at working with the DOM.
jQuery's legacy is that now modern JavaScript has many of the features jQuery offered.
I would think twice about using it.
How’s it going, I'm a Adam, a Full-Stack Engineer, actively searching for work. I'm all about JavaScript. And Frontend but don't let that fool you - I've also got some serious Backend skills.
Location
City of Bath, UK 🇬🇧
Education
10 plus years* active enterprise development experience and a Fine art degree 🎨
Stop contradicting yourself..,
"no specific purpose but it is particularly good at working with the DOM."
" it is nothing special but became so popular because it made JavaScript easier to write back in 2012"
What have you done yourself, that benefited the world
How’s it going, I'm a Adam, a Full-Stack Engineer, actively searching for work. I'm all about JavaScript. And Frontend but don't let that fool you - I've also got some serious Backend skills.
Location
City of Bath, UK 🇬🇧
Education
10 plus years* active enterprise development experience and a Fine art degree 🎨
How’s it going, I'm a Adam, a Full-Stack Engineer, actively searching for work. I'm all about JavaScript. And Frontend but don't let that fool you - I've also got some serious Backend skills.
Location
City of Bath, UK 🇬🇧
Education
10 plus years* active enterprise development experience and a Fine art degree 🎨
having "no specific purpose" is exactly equal to "general purpose". It is not negative and you you attack me for it personally! I have done literally nothing wrong here. I have learning difficulties which affect my ability to communicate and you apply a negative tone and literally ask me what am I worth as a human.
Teaching my child is a contribution to the world. Helping thousands of foster childre ln is another. So I again I ask you what the heck is making you so hostile I have done nothing wrong here!
How’s it going, I'm a Adam, a Full-Stack Engineer, actively searching for work. I'm all about JavaScript. And Frontend but don't let that fool you - I've also got some serious Backend skills.
Location
City of Bath, UK 🇬🇧
Education
10 plus years* active enterprise development experience and a Fine art degree 🎨
How’s it going, I'm a Adam, a Full-Stack Engineer, actively searching for work. I'm all about JavaScript. And Frontend but don't let that fool you - I've also got some serious Backend skills.
Location
City of Bath, UK 🇬🇧
Education
10 plus years* active enterprise development experience and a Fine art degree 🎨
Hi pandademic, I totally understand why you asked the question it's 100% valid. Unfortunately my style of writing is not always clear to some people and often I get misunderstood. I am sorry for hijacking your post. I can delete this thread if it helps?
No , it's fine. I didn't see you were replying to someone. I thought is was a separate comment , & you were asking what why I asked about jQuery . Also , Great article about choosing the right raspberry pi , it helped very much!
instead of typing document.querySelectorAll() you can use $()
everyone prefers this so it will always be around. Some snobs spend 5 years learning to do js a hard way through various compilers etc will tell you its bad because their way is better. but it isn't. Their way is non standard html tags, no page on load, bad seo etc. But really jquery is a great way to manipulate an existing standard dom and always will be. Sadly chromescript will probably do somethign to block it in several years to push everyone onto their dogshit platform therefore breaking lots of websites.
well it also has $.get(something) for ajax calls. and a $('#mytag').html('new content') to replace shit. which is just about all you need for an SPA. also some shorthands for event listneners. i.e. $('.somebutton').on('click') basically you use that dollar to access this API api.jquery.com/ and it can be applied to any selector you pass into the dollar. It used to be more useful as well for its array methods but now they are built into js so less required for merging and extend and looping for people who couldn't be arsed to type a for loop.
Javascript was a programming language developed to add animations to static HTML pages. Webpages had have tree like structure, which is called Document Object Model (DOM). Javascript didn't have anything special to work with DOM.
JQuery, a javascript library, made it easier to work with DOM, and started a revolution in 2012.
We need to appreciate the work put in by men to make life easier,most of the comments speaks negatively about jquery,but in its time,it benefited everyone, great companies used it,even employed those who knows it well,some are still using Jquery.
Today, its react,Vue,Angular,Ember, they will fadeout tomorrow, that doesn't mean we should speak bad of this tools.
Take this,anytime you want to speak negative about a tool,as yourself, what have you done yourself
How’s it going, I'm a Adam, a Full-Stack Engineer, actively searching for work. I'm all about JavaScript. And Frontend but don't let that fool you - I've also got some serious Backend skills.
Location
City of Bath, UK 🇬🇧
Education
10 plus years* active enterprise development experience and a Fine art degree 🎨
How’s it going, I'm a Adam, a Full-Stack Engineer, actively searching for work. I'm all about JavaScript. And Frontend but don't let that fool you - I've also got some serious Backend skills.
Location
City of Bath, UK 🇬🇧
Education
10 plus years* active enterprise development experience and a Fine art degree 🎨
Oh yes and $() is just a function named dollar. I once believed that it wasn't and that jQuery was a language due to confusing job descriptions and inexperience.
An obsolete JavaScript library that was used mostly to eliminate differences in browsers. Over time additional features was added to it, such as animations, etc, and it did provide some syntax advantages over "vanilla JavaScript", but over time it became mostly obsolete and replaced by more mature frameworks and larger things such as React and Angular. 10 years ago you would use it in 99% of your projects. Today you will probably only use it in 1% of your projects - Assuming you were creating frontend web stuff manipulating the DOM that is ...
If you have to ask you're better of learning Angular or React, I'd recommend Angular since it's an easier beginner framework ...
Top comments (29)
In the old days, before Chrome and Firefox, when Internet Explorer wasn’t even a decade old, Netscape Navigator was still a major part of the browser market share, and ECMAScript 3 was the core basis for JavaScript, the DOM APIs were very different. Those differences mostly involved requiring you to manually traverse the DOM to find groups of elements that matched specific criteria. Essentially, you had to implement
document.querySelector()and the various related functions yourself, and event handling was rather more complicated (and less consistent).Because of how crappy the DOM APIs were early on, one of the big things at the time was to write libraries to make them better (as is normal for programmers to do). jQuery was one of the most successful such libraries (Prototype is another early example that held on for a long time), providing both an easy way to select elements or groups of elements using CSS selectors (this functionality was earth-shattering when it was first implemented, though I do not recall if jQuery was where it first came into being) and much nicer event handling, as well as some nice utility functions for things like JS-powered animations or AJAX networking functionality.
Over time, a significant percentage of the functionality in jQuery has either been added to the DOM APIs (most significantly including the element selection functionality and much, but not all, of the event handling improvements) or implemented in other ways in the usual web tool stack (for example, many of the basic parts of the animations are now in CSS). However, jQuery has hung on due to the huge amount of other things that depend on jQuery (for example, Bootstrap only got rid of their dependency on jQuery with Bootstrap 5 a few months ago).
Thank's for the history & explantaion!
jQuery is this old thing that a lot of people used to use (a few still do). It is a library wrote in JavaScript, it is nothing special but became so popular because it made JavaScript easier to write back in 2012. It has no specific purpose but it is particularly good at working with the DOM.
jQuery's legacy is that now modern JavaScript has many of the features jQuery offered.
I would think twice about using it.
So it's Old , but great for DOM?
No Matter how silly the question, you would get better answers with more specific questions but yes that's correct.
Old but good with DOM manipulation
Thank you!
Not only for DOM. It has great event system (super easy delegation, namespaces), quite nice ajax support.
Oh , Thanks !
There are so many powerful plugins made with jQuery too. (like advanced data tables, charts, and so much more)
Oh , Nice !
Stop contradicting yourself..,
"no specific purpose but it is particularly good at working with the DOM."
" it is nothing special but became so popular because it made JavaScript easier to write back in 2012"
What have you done yourself, that benefited the world
I raised an autistic son and taught him to use sign language in the middle of a pandemic, what about you?
I guess that's not to the world,its your son..not a library or language, be humble
having "no specific purpose" is exactly equal to "general purpose". It is not negative and you you attack me for it personally! I have done literally nothing wrong here. I have learning difficulties which affect my ability to communicate and you apply a negative tone and literally ask me what am I worth as a human.
Teaching my child is a contribution to the world. Helping thousands of foster childre ln is another. So I again I ask you what the heck is making you so hostile I have done nothing wrong here!
Hahaha okay why?
Why did I ask the question?
Hi pandademic, I totally understand why you asked the question it's 100% valid. Unfortunately my style of writing is not always clear to some people and often I get misunderstood. I am sorry for hijacking your post. I can delete this thread if it helps?
No , it's fine. I didn't see you were replying to someone. I thought is was a separate comment , & you were asking what why I asked about jQuery . Also , Great article about choosing the right raspberry pi , it helped very much!
instead of typing document.querySelectorAll() you can use $()
everyone prefers this so it will always be around. Some snobs spend 5 years learning to do js a hard way through various compilers etc will tell you its bad because their way is better. but it isn't. Their way is non standard html tags, no page on load, bad seo etc. But really jquery is a great way to manipulate an existing standard dom and always will be. Sadly chromescript will probably do somethign to block it in several years to push everyone onto their dogshit platform therefore breaking lots of websites.
So jQuery adds $() , & a better way to manipulate the standard DOM?
well it also has $.get(something) for ajax calls. and a $('#mytag').html('new content') to replace shit. which is just about all you need for an SPA. also some shorthands for event listneners. i.e. $('.somebutton').on('click') basically you use that dollar to access this API api.jquery.com/ and it can be applied to any selector you pass into the dollar. It used to be more useful as well for its array methods but now they are built into js so less required for merging and extend and looping for people who couldn't be arsed to type a for loop.
Javascript was a programming language developed to add animations to static HTML pages. Webpages had have tree like structure, which is called Document Object Model (DOM). Javascript didn't have anything special to work with DOM.
JQuery, a javascript library, made it easier to work with DOM, and started a revolution in 2012.
We need to appreciate the work put in by men to make life easier,most of the comments speaks negatively about jquery,but in its time,it benefited everyone, great companies used it,even employed those who knows it well,some are still using Jquery.
Today, its react,Vue,Angular,Ember, they will fadeout tomorrow, that doesn't mean we should speak bad of this tools.
Take this,anytime you want to speak negative about a tool,as yourself, what have you done yourself
jQuery is a bunch of code written in JavaScript
This is very accurate ☺️
Oh yes and
$()is just a function named dollar. I once believed that it wasn't and that jQuery was a language due to confusing job descriptions and inexperience.Oh , Thanks!
An obsolete JavaScript library that was used mostly to eliminate differences in browsers. Over time additional features was added to it, such as animations, etc, and it did provide some syntax advantages over "vanilla JavaScript", but over time it became mostly obsolete and replaced by more mature frameworks and larger things such as React and Angular. 10 years ago you would use it in 99% of your projects. Today you will probably only use it in 1% of your projects - Assuming you were creating frontend web stuff manipulating the DOM that is ...
If you have to ask you're better of learning Angular or React, I'd recommend Angular since it's an easier beginner framework ...
cool
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