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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

Nice work but one comment: it's not clear to me why this is a jQuery plugin. In the setup you simply install a constructor (ie new $.BigVideo()) and that's it.

Unless there's more to it than that IMHO you'd be better served making it independent of jQuery. As popular as jQuery is, it's not a given.

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Things from BigVideo that would be varying degrees of PITA to roll your own, pending the browser support:

  * measuring window size 
  * creating a slider slider component without full <input type=range support>
  * having appropriate snap points on that slider
  * event model normalization
  * pub/sub
  * detecting when an image asset has loaded
  * $(body).prepend() equivalence: insertBefore() can throw if someone's HTML has a comment comment directly inside the body tag (typical with HTML5 Boilerplate code)

Sure it'd be nice to have this be plain old JS, but as a developer you're signing up for a lot of pain that is merely just plumbing required to build your unique component. If BigVideo was targeting IE10 and everyone else, then we'd have a much better looking story in the code.

Yeah, I JUJ'd it.™ (just use jQuery)

The exact reason I use jQuery for projects that aren't jQuery projects myself. The years of work and testing that have gone into jQuery make it an invaluable asset when working with Javascript and if you were to do what jQuery and dozens of contributors have been doing the past 5 years that would be one hell of a project.

This couldn't have come at a better time. I've just been tasked with creating a landing page with full-screen background scaling video and this plugin will make my life easier.

Looking at the source, he uses jQuery under the hood for (at least) element manipulation, event handling, and the ui-slider. So the effort is non-trivial, although it probably wouldn't be too difficult for someone to rewrite it if motivated.

Nice work + demo, btw.

As a fervent Mootools supporter I couldnt agree more, but at the same time i've pretty much given up trying to not use jQuery. Unfortunately it does seem like "jQuery Won" the core-framework wars. Use it or GTFO according to most web devs nowdawys. At least they're making it modular now so you can roll your own.

I've seen lots of js projects that have a jQuery dependency for the sole reason of selecting elements.

It's fairly trivial to cook up a simple jQuery like selector but others have already done it: e.g. https://github.com/ryt/Selector

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