jQuery too much overhead? What kind of environment was that?
Just compare the work a browser has to do for something like:
document.getElementById("foo").setAttribute("bar", "baz");
Now the good thing is that most consumers of jquery don't care about performance of their code (in that they're doing small enough amounts of stuff it doesn't matter much).
$('#foo').attr('bar', 'baz');
30 times faster in Chrome 9
81 times faster in Firefox 3.6
> Now the good thing is that most consumers of jquery don't
> care about performance of their code