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When I made the first version 2 years ago I thought that classes would feel more natural to newbies, but since then have data-attributes become pretty much standard in the community.

But today it's mostly a performance thing. List.js is supposed to be very fast and handle really long lists (check out http://sindresorhus.com/bower-components/ it has 6000+ items)

Excellent example use in the wild thanks, demonstrates your point well. And good to see list.js in the list. Bower rules. http://sindresorhus.com/bower-components/#!/search/list.js

In the standard case I agree (and I hope there is an option for that). I think the use case for this library is dropping it into a soup of HTML cooked up by a non-technical user. A programmer would have a JSON list to work with from the start. Could be totally off base here though, would love to see other takes on it.

If the class names remain semantic, I don't think there is much harm using classes. The class names in the examples accurate describe the elements inner content.

Querying by class over data attributes is also usually faster.