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Rex? Rex Ballard?

Hats off. The 68000 was the first CPU owned (Atari ST) and I had a good six years of assembly skills behind me when it was finally time to leave. Awesome CPU for the kind of magic demo tricks only hard core assembler coding could bring out.

Relevant discussion: http://compgroups.net/comp.os....

Geesh, I feel like I am back in the .advocacy newsgroups of the mid 90's. Fun example.

I guess we want these fun-fest topics on Slashdot. For some reason.

Then can the browser vendors at least look at the fucked up work arounds they had to do to get jquery to even work and fix them?

The problem is that jQuery is so poorly implemented -- and so badly broken that there no value can be gained from its examination!

It's pretty obvious that Resig et al. don't have a clue. The "work arounds" are "fucked up" because they were written by rank amateurs who *still* don't know what they're doing!

As far consistency between browsers, I agree that things have improved. Even IE. So much so, in fact, that a few polyfills is often more than adequate to take care of the differences between browsers. (Just be careful with them. Some are great, while others are total garbage.)

Read the links I posted and dig around comp.lang.javascript for a little bit. If you're still advocating the use of jQuery after that, I don't know what to tell you!

My view on the matter is anyone who is criticizing Jquery / Dojo / and is suggesting vanilla javascript is completely ignoring the fact that the reason allot of these frameworks exists is the base implementations are horribly, horribly broken and the effects of a piece of javascript can be inconsistent even within the same browser.

But neither jQuery or Dojo actually solved the problem! (Sometimes they'd even make the problem worse...) The myth from years ago was that jQuery took care of all your cross-browser concerns. That was never even a little bit true. jQuery was, and still is, inconsistent across even the few browsers it claims to support. That's to say nothing of it's ever-shifting API!

Things are not nearly as broken as you seem to think they are. The differences between browsers can easily be managed by knowing what features to avoid -- and you don't need to avoid very much at all! Usually a small and simple polyfill or two will take care of any features you need -- even if you need to support antique versions of IE.

Ignoring the fact that it's broken and incompetently written, it also has a very unstable API.

Add to that the ridiculous feature overlap between jQuery and vanilla JS and it's clear that such a fit would be very uncomfortable.

You keep claiming jQuery is slow and crappy because a few frameworks that exist on top of it are slow.

No, I've been claiming that jQuery is slow and crappy all on it's own. jQuery UI and Mobile just happen to be even slower.

jQuery is not a performance killer.

Actual data suggests otherwise. This is completely objective. You can test this for yourself. You pay a VERY steep price for using jQuery even for very simple things.

What it does do, however, is cut development time considerably.

Have any metrics? From what I've seen, it adds significant development time over the life of the application. Do you know how common it is to see multiple versions of jQuery loaded on the same page? (jQuery even has features to help allow that to happen!) Do you have any idea how difficult is is to dig someone out of a mess like that?

The only way jQuery could possibly "cut development time" is if you never maintain your code -- and only then if typing speed is your biggest bottleneck.

I won't claim that jQuery is faster than every native solution. But it is probably faster than your native solution. And infinitely more maintainable.

Have you looked at the jQuery codebase? It's like a group of amateurs that didn't understand either JS or the DOM wrote a library. Oh, wait, that's exactly what happened! (Seriously, check the Usenet archives. It's a riot.)

No surprise, the developers are still less than competent. How on earth did this abomination get so popular? It's a complete mystery to me.

Or do you mean code written using jQuery? Now that's impossible to maintain! (For reasons mentioned earlier and later.) Add to it that jQuery code is mostly written by amateurs who don't know any better (or professionals that don't want to face the simple fact that JavaScript is not C# and they'll need to learn some new concepts). When you see jQuery, you can safely assume that the code is a mess anyway.

Provides a consistent experience across most browsers and gracefully falls back when browsers don't provide native solutions.

Nonsense. jQuery has *never* been cross-browser -- and never really did well across the few browsers it claimed to support! The word "consistent" is a bad joke. when paired with "jQuery". How long has it been around now? It still doesn't have a stable API!

Oh, and did you hear? They're dropping support for IE8 and below. Not that it did a great job of supporting those browsers anyway, but it's yet another reason that jQuery has LONG outlived its utility.

If it was you wouldn't see it on nearly every website more complicated than "hi my name is

See my earlier post. Take the challenge and see how various websites actually use jQuery. If you're not completely disgusted, I can't help you.

Here's why see jQuery used everywhere: JavaScript is difficult to learn. Well, that's not quite right. It's really easy, actually, but it's not at all like Java, C#, or any other popular language. It just looks a lot like popular languages. That causes a lot of confusion from developers who are used to picking a new language by reading a few code samples and hitting google a few times. You simply can't learn JavaScript that way.

jQuery came with false promises like cross-browser compatibility and a myth of ease-of-use. Developers who never touched JavaScript before took jQuery as an "easy way out" -- never mind that none of the promises it made were ever true, that's what they were told and that's what they believed. They were told that JavaScript is difficult or full of pitfalls. That wasn't true, of course, it's just that the language was so different from what developers were used to from language's with similar syntax that they m