I think it's not really needed in today's browser landscape unless you're working on a team that uses it.
I prefer fetch, document.querySelectorAll, and animate.css for 90% of what you would need with jQuery.
I prefer fetch, document.querySelectorAll, and animate.css for 90% of what you would need with jQuery.
You know how there's ~3 kinds of Excel users? You have your formatted rows and columns types, people like me that can use SUM(), call APIs and know what pivot tables are... and then there are those ninjas that can implement ray-traced dungeon renderers in a cell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCeOEQVUWZ0
I'm not exactly claiming Carmack-level jQuery proficiency, but comments like yours make me wonder (optimistically) whether you've forgotten all of the amazingly useful things that jQuery can do. Ajax, selectors and CSS transitions are the Nickelback of creative possibility.
As a final note, I am excited that things which once required jQuery are now being solved by the browser and the evolving EcmaScript standard. Ideally, jQuery continues to get smaller and smaller. However, it's intellectually dishonest to claim that all of the non-jQuery techniques are as ergonomic to implement as jQuery idioms. Proof:
http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/
I do really like fetch and async/await in general, and working in React has taught me lots of cool tricks to bring back to my real projects. I think everyone should try to build something real with React, just to understand how lucky they are to have the option not to use it.
It's been several years since I last used jQuery, but what are those other useful things that are hard using Vanilla.js? (Legitimate question, not being sarcastic here)
Can you tell me which use case you would need to do this? I don't think there is anything wrong with this functionality, but it seems like if you needed it, that your HTML is needlessly complex.
An example use case: the person writing the HTML ≠ the person writing the selectors. Browser extensions like Stylus, for example. If the HTML author did not bother to add a specific class you need, you have to resort to ugly methods.
In fact, this is a scenario I deal with regularly. I have a Chrome extension for video download sites that scans the current page for metadata (title, performers, release date, etc.) and decorates the download links with `download="…"` attributes, so that I can download a file with a properly formatted filename. I manually adapt this extension to every site I need, and quite often I need things like `a[href^=/model/]` † to distinguish links to performers from other links to get their text content. It's clearly not a situation the site authors worry about, and that's fine as long as I have a way to do this myself.
† This particular selector can be done without jQuery if you don't care about backcompat. In browser extensions, you usually don't. But it's still an answer to your question about when such selectors are needed.
---
Since I'm talking about this, that same browser extension can demonstrate some other complications brought on by React and CSS-in-JS:
1. CSS-in-JS turns class names into unreliable gobbledygook, so extracting metadata means more regex selectors and abominable DOM hierarchy selectors (`section>div>div:first-child>div` because nobody bothers with semantic <h2> or even .title anymore).
2. React makes DOM elements vanish and reappear instead of just hiding them, so that `download="…"` attribute I want to add has to go through a MutationObserver instead of just running once on page load.
However, there are some jQuery functions that I use all of the time:
$.closest() and less frequently, $.parentsUntil()
Not just $.siblings() and $.next()/$.prev(), but $.nextAll() and $.nextUntil()
$.getJSON()
$.toggleClass()
Deep extend via $.extend(true, {}, objA, objB)
jQuery's custom event triggering is A+
$.delay()
$.end()
Consider this a solid starting point for further exploration.
Deep copy/deep extend is a must in every programming language ever. I have no idea why 90% of the environments I ever programmed with make it so damn hard to deep copy data. In javascript it is kind of comical. [1]
Traversal utilities like closest/parentsUntil/nextAll/nextUntil is something I miss in most standard libraries. No for DOM manipulation, but for traversing lists and such. Until/while idioms are par for course in imperative contexts but I miss them in functional programming contexts. Not that they're that hard to implement with a couple lines :)
Delay is further proof that the jQuery API design is nothing short of amazing. I wish more APIs were like that. The only thing that comes close to me, albeit in a completely different domain, is LINQ.
I had no idea about End. That's point-free programming black magic. [2] Love it.
One traversal mechanism I'd love to see but I've never seen implemented coherently is... given my relationship to ancestor X, iterate through all my antecedent peers under x. This would make processing some kinds of structured data far simpler.
End really is one of those hats-off bits of magic, and it's one of the first things that come to mind when any of the frothing haters pen statements that preclude anything good coming from method chaining. It'd be even better if ES supported Ruby-style send syntax eg. array.map(&:to_s). And yes, I put it last because I was going for clever.
You know what drives me even more crazy than ES' lack of deep copy/extend? How is it possible that ({k: 1} === {k: 1}) is false? I find this to be maddening. Thank goodness for lodash.
That sounds really simple to achieve with with a (lazy) function that returns a list containing all ancestors of a tree, and then a "until" or "up to" function that returns everything from that list until a certain condition is met.
Those are things that should be included alongside Map and Reduce :)
> How is it possible that ({k: 1} === {k: 1}) is false? I find this to be maddening. Thank goodness for lodash.
Oh, I strongly agree. And lodash should be the standard library of the language. Not only of Javascript, but most languages out there.
> End really is one of those hats-off bits of magic, and it's one of the first things that come to mind when any of the frothing haters pen statements that preclude anything good coming from method chaining.
About End (and point free style in general), I understand why people might dislike it, but then again, I think it comes down to familiarity. After ten years of exposure to LINQ, Haskell, underscore/lodash and FP in general I also find it super hard to follow code that uses for/do/while in overly clever ways (my own C code comes to mind).
I think I find it easier to see code as a "graph" rather than assigning something to a temporary variable, and that's what End allows me to.
=> true
I don't get it. Why would you not want this? And when you're used to it working, how could missing so common and logical not be maddening? When does the maddening kick in... before or after I have to install lodash for comparing objects?
Are you busting me on semantics? Do I literally have to check into a mental health care facility after not being able to natively compare simple ES objects to satisfy you?
And for those times where you're interested in comparing instances of a hash, every instance of an object has an object_id getter:
a = {k: 1}
b = {k: 1}
a == b # true
a.object_id == b.object_id # false
Of course, this is a lot of typing, so Matz also gave us:
a.equal? b # false
Ultimately, this is what I love about the diversity of a pluralist language ecosystem. The polyglots will always win.
I don't use React/Vue/Flavor-of-the-month UI library for my day job; however I don't use jQuery either.
I am not trying to shit on what can be accomplished with it; however, I debug a lot of code that adds it in where ES6/vanilla javascript does the same thing. I guess I prefer verbose javascript over using jQuery... not trying to knock on it, but it might be worth looking at other tools for the long term.
Edit: To be clear, I am not advocating to rip out jQuery fron existing apps. In a lot of cases, jQuery and jQuery plugins are helpful, but most of the code that I am paid to debug ends up being rewritten in vanilla js because I feel comfortable using that. I stopped using jQuery a while back because I opted to use a UI library a while back and worked hard to avoid jQuery ever since even though I don't use UI libraries at my current job.
Use whatever tool floats your boat and doesn't piss off the rest of your team. It's possible to ship spaghetti code in any flavor you want. I happen to (currently) work on things where the level of complexity of the UI is simple enough to use vanilla JS and not need a UI framework.
I love jQuery and will switch for vanilla JS only when it's okay to do so, like when support on old browsers isn't that much of a priority.
If coding is your day job and you work on corporate applications, it's likely that you're on a team big enough to start discussing how things like React might be necessary and valuable.
If you're building a linear CRUD application, you probably still don't need Reactive frameworks, but you're in the right ballpark to be talking about it. Otherwise, history will not be kind.
I spent all of five minutes glancing through the example list and noticed their `replaceWith` doesn't provide the functionality that jQuery offers -- it doesn't take into account event handlers bound to DOM elements. Also, their `extend` does a shallow merge, not a deep merge. Furthermore, the YMNNJ examples are often far more verbose and less expressive than the jQuery examples.
I don't particularly understand the rush to rip jQuery out of everything. It seems like a lot of people are doing it just because it's the trending thing to do. There are some things that jQuery does very well -- even in today's world where modern web dev is dominated by SPA components.
I'm the maintainer of https://github.com/elliotnb/observable-slim and https://github.com/elliotnb/nimbly -- the latter of which is an SPA component framework whose core requires jQuery. It uses jQuery to update DOM nodes with `replaceWith`, merge deeply nested objects with `extend`, among other things. Nimbly components are not required to use jQuery -- only the framework core uses it. Aside from the eliminating the extra 69KB footprint from adding jQuery slim min, I don't see any reason to rush to rip jQuery out of the Nimbly core. On the contrary, using jQuery helped us get the framework built faster and helped us keep the code expressive and easy-to-follow.
Surely that's their entire point? They provide the link as evidence that
> it's intellectually dishonest to claim that all of the non-jQuery techniques are as ergonomic to implement as jQuery idioms
Not as evidence that you don't need jquery.
youprobablystillwantjquery.com is still available at the time of this writing.
The site has plenty of examples of vanilla requiring writing multiple lines compared to one jQuery line, which I took to be your point regarding "ergonomics." EB66 seems more focused on a subtler point regarding the site, that their vanilla examples don't do everything the jQuery version does.
I'm not following your point. The point of YMNNJ is that you can use their examples to quickly replace bits of jQuery code. I've identified that a few of their examples (possibly more) are not equivalent replacements -- demonstrating that jQuery is indeed needed.
Your second quote doesn't come from me. It's misleading the way you quoted it in response to my post.
That doesn't mean that's how the person you responded to uses it.
> Your second quote doesn't come from me.
The second quote comes from the comment you responded to, I'm pointing out that its author specifically used YMNNJ to demonstrate that not using jquery can be significantly less convenient and ergonomic than using it.
For almost any website that has actual use-cases for it, it's not going to be the data bottleneck. Plus most websites have way more severe bloat elsewhere to worry about
The examples in the site already look quite outdated. We now have `fetch()`, `.attachEvent` is all but dead, plus all the ES6 features like arrow functions, destructuring, spread... and reactive UI means you'll rarely, if ever, need to call DOM tree modifying methods yourself.
The best part, "Reactive UI" being a paradigm, you have many other options besides React+JSX, for example https://github.com/jorgebucaran/hyperapp. At a fraction of the size of jQuery, which one is the 'monster'?
And the jQuery Ajax methods are super-handy. POST with the fetch API is long-winded; while the jQuery promise-handling sucks, it was enough to make me use $.post() in the current project.
You don't need to use that API. Deferred is compatible with Promise, you can just simply `await $.post()` etc.
See last section of http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.Deferred/
If you're worried about backwards compatibility, then jQuery is the right tool; however, if less than 2% of your users are using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer, I would spend more time flashing a message instructing these users to upgrade.