Why do yo use JavaScript-Libraries like jQuery?

11 points

13 years ago

jQuery was released in January 2006. At this time, IE6 was the major browser at the market, so everything concerning to JavaScript was a bit messed-up with Microsoft specific stuff, Firefox market share was growing, the need for animations combined with CSS 2 came up etc. pp.

Today, we have our browsers in a who-is-most-standard-compliant-competition and a lot of nice new APIs with most of the basic ones even supported by IE 8, so most of them have higher backwards-compatibility than jQuery 2.x, which officially only supports IE >9.x.

So I asked me: For which reason are most of the web developers using jQuery? I mean: Selecting DOM elements isn't an argument, Element.querySelector should be faster. AJAX complexibility isn't an argument, ActiveXObject is dead since IE 7. Animations aren't an argument, CSS 3 is grown-up. Since ECMAScript 5, there's Array.prototype.forEach. Events can be easily handled by CustomEvent.

If you're interested in these native APIs called WebAPI, just take a visit to MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element.querySelector https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/element https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Node https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API (Everything at a glance)

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