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Comment by michaelwww | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that people continue to use jQuery because it makes DOM manipulation that much easier. The Dart authors kept this in mind and said jokingly on http://www.dartlang.org/articles/improving-the-dom/ One area where the DOM has a bunch of baggage is finding elements. Today’s DOM has a pile of methods for finding stuff. All of this piled up before jQuery appeared on a mountaintop to give us the revelation that Thou Shalt Find Nodes By Using CSS Selectors. With the One True Way in hand, we’ve stripped it down to just two (!) methods: query() and queryAll().

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Querying is only a small part of it, though. jQuery provides result sets as proxies for the actual objects. So this:

    $(".foo").css("color", "green");

will actually apply the CSS to all matches. This becomes doubly handy when doing things like attaching event handlers, removing nodes, etc.

Looking at Dart's API, I don't see anything like it; queryAll() returns a List<Element>. In order to act on a collection of elements, you have to use iteration mechanisms such as for loops.

The whole concept behind jQuery's $() is that it's a DSL.

I'm all for simplicity, and, again, this isn't an argument against Dart. But I would still contend that merely shrinking your DOM API surface area is only of marginal significance.

Historically, the hardest part of interacting with the DOM has been the inconsistencies (and missing functionality) amongst ancient browser versions. We've had standardized methods for a long time now that make DOM interactions relatively trivial if you have the luxury of working with browsers that support them.

> Historically, the hardest part of interacting with the DOM has been the inconsistencies (and missing functionality) amongst ancient browser versions.

Even newer browsers have a surprising amount of DOM inconsistencies, especially for newer HTML5 APIs that are still evolving. While this is an ongoing job, the Dart DOM API tries hard to polyfill that so that you get a single API that works across most browsers.

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