Why I'm still using jQuery

by UkiahSmith • 7 years ago

457 171 7 years ago

I would argue that the comfort of using jQuery comes at the cost of speed and obfuscation. I stopped using jQuery about 2 years ago and for the most part had no problems whatsoever even when I was forced to support IE9. Also I found that searching http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ helps a lot when deciding how to implement certain features.

JanSt• 7 years ago

If JQuery is all you need to get the job done, go for it. It's still fast, simple and easy to develop.

If you need state management, build a very complex app, etc. ... don't.

cyberferret• 7 years ago

This is pretty much it in a nutshell. About the only use case where I will look at a framework outside of jQuery is if I want complex state management, or be able to handle LOTS of updating hotspots on the screen.

I'm a proud user of jQuery from way back in the early days, and still haven't found anything to beat it for writing a quick AJAX call to a back end from a web page.

arp2423• 7 years ago

If you need state management, build a very complex app, etc. ... don't.

I'm not so sure you do for many sites. Take something like Reddit for example; I don't think the new SPA redesign is any better than the old template-driven app. In fact, IMHO it's worse in every way. Part of that is just a matter of design and not technical, but part of it is just "SPA hell": CPU goes to 100% on load, takes ages to load stuff, etc.

On the other hand, I find something like FastMail's web UI to be quite pleasant. So it certainly is possible, but I do think it's a lot harder to get an SPA right than it is to get a classic template-driven app right. It's also a lot more complex, which results in all sorts of problems.

I don't think jQuery is the "perfect" way to develop stuff; the lack of structure means things can get messy (we've all seen that), but I'm not convinced that React is the best answer to that (just because A is imperfect doesn't mean B is the answer, a common fallacy in these types of discussions).

I'm not quite sure what the best way is, and perhaps it already exists and I'm unaware of it, but in the meanwhile I prefer to stick with the "KISS" solution. If I look at the websites I really like using then they're all classic "progressive enhancement" ones, and not SPAs (in fact, FastMail is the only exception that I can think of).

Either way, the post was mainly intended as "vanilla JS vs. jQuery", rather than "classic JS vs. modern SPA" (although they're obviously related discussions).

jsgyx• 7 years ago

I am not a proponent of SPAs, in fact quite the opposite, but I think Reddit has done a disservice to the pro-SPA community because their engineering team is completely useless and their redesign is a train-wreck. Thus I think using Reddit as an example of what SPAs can or can't be is dishonest.

cube00• 7 years ago

With the way Reddit tries to shove it's app down your throat while using their SPA the cynic in me wonders if it's not designed to be as painful as possible if you persist. The last time I tried, I got THREE separate UI components prompting me to use the app.

simion314• 7 years ago

It depends what you do with jQuery. Maybe you use a nice , well tested and full featured plugin (calendar, grid view) then jQuery works. Or if you want to manipulate html (you grab an html from a page and you want to export it as epub but you want to remove some stuff before, cleanup some styles, jQuery is much better at DOM manipulation then pure JS)

IMO what you should never do is put your application state inside the DOM if you have a complex page/app.

ehnto8• 7 years ago

Shopify is a great example. They have both, but in the right places. The websites themselves are not SPAs, because they don't need to be. A minicart is barely reason to pull in an SPA framework and architecture, so they didn't. But their live theme editor tooling makes full use of the power of an SPA.

nkozyra2• 7 years ago

I think the most compelling reason to keep JavaScript is "it's already there."

I see no reason to yank it out unless you're already doing some front end refactoring

sureaboutthis• 7 years ago

If you yanked JavaScript out, you wouldn't have jQuery either.

nkozyra2• 7 years ago

Slip of the fingers, obviously

dsenkus• 7 years ago

convenience is the primary reason I still sometimes use jQuery. Sure dropping one more dependency always seems rewarding, but jQuery is just a tool which when used properly saves a lot of time.

JaTochNietDan8• 7 years ago

I'm heavily inclined to agree with this. In fact, only this weekend I was working on a very simple one page tool and from the get-go I decided to adopt this "vanilla" only approach, i.e no JS libraries really at all.

Pretty quickly I found myself wishing I had just used jQuery or at least some other library to make stuff easier and get things done faster. When I finally got it completed in the end I wasn't sure why I bothered to struggle and waste so much time instead of just including jQuery and making things a bunch easier and less verbose. Sure, there may be other libraries worth using instead but the point against the "vanilla JS is all you need" argument.

I actually found the cited website in this post http://youmightnotneedjquery.com to be so strange as examples of why you may not need jQuery that it may be satire. I was surprised to find out that it was not satire. So I actually forked it and created https://youmightneedjquery.com, on which I may change some text in the future. It may not load for you yet as the DNS propagates.

You can find the fork on my Github account here: https://github.com/JaTochNietDan/youmightnotneedjquery

I'll make some changes later to show the satirical nature of it.

paradoja• 7 years ago

Getting a

Error code: SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN

trying to access https://youmightneedjquery.com .

JaTochNietDan8• 7 years ago

The Github certificate takes a while to sign so I've turned off enforcement for the time being :).

lampe32• 7 years ago

So what was the struggle with vanilla js?

I'm just curious :)

One of the first things I learned in web development was jquery but right now I never use it. Even if I create a vanilla html/css/js website.

skizm2• 7 years ago

Not really a struggle, but why would you want to type ten lines when two will do?

sametmax• 7 years ago

The fetch API is nowhere as convenient as the jQuery one.

It requires craft to get addEventListener() on par with on().

jQuery comes with many implicits loops that save you time.

fadeIn() is easier to handle than the equivalent css. jQuery supports edge if you target it (things like prepend(), parent() work on it).

Error handling is just better. E.G: jQuery().val() will not raise an error if there is no match while document.getElementById().value will.

And probably a hundred of other little details that won't come out of my head but that will grind my gear if I start working on code.

Chaining is awesome to manipulate DOM. The imperative API is very verbose.

So. Many. Plugins.

I'm more of a VueJS guy now, but if I have only a quick page to setup, the 30ko of jquery are better than anything I can produce to wrap my repetitive code.

austincheney4• 7 years ago

Struggle with vanilla JS is my inspiration for writing this, which was up voted 20 times: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19946032

JaTochNietDan8• 7 years ago

I don't disagree that you should know core concepts of what you're writing. I write a lot of Go without any heavy abstraction libraries (i.e ORMs) and have done with others like PHP in the past too.

With abstraction there has to be a balance though. Sure, I concede that knowing how it works is actually important, hence why I've spent a lot of time doing things without libraries in the past, especially as I was learning. It actually enrages me when people who've only ever used ORMs make super basic mistakes when writing and executing SQL themselves for the first time, i.e selecting a bunch of relationships in a loop one by one, instead of getting them all in one query. Stuff like that is a good example of how only ever working with abstracted versions of your tech stack results in mistakes down the line that have costs, since the abstracted version doesn't explain these concepts to you.

However, when it comes to actually trying to get things done efficiently, abstraction can help a bunch. Writing a bunch of stuff from scratch every time is not particularly productive either.

mgkimsal• 7 years ago

your link above is https://youmightneedjquery.com" <--- quote was in the link.

JaTochNietDan8• 7 years ago

Ah, I've just removed the quotes. Thanks.

indocomsoft• 7 years ago

You have some pretty unidiomatic JS in there. For example:

Array.prototype.filter.call(document.querySelectorAll(selector), filterFn);

What's more idiomatic is document.querySelectorAll(selector).filter(filterFn)

The same holds for forEach.

I suggest you look into how javascript prototype based OOP works

JaTochNietDan8• 7 years ago

I didn't make the site, it's a fork of the original website by Hubspot.

arp2423• 7 years ago

.filter() is not a method on the NodeList though, it only has forEach(), and even that is quite recent.

This is why people convert it to an array, and one of many reasons the standard JS API (and the DOM one in particular) are annoying to work with.

saltminer2• 7 years ago

There's a mixed-content warning because the original site doesn't have a valid HTTPS cert but yours forces HTTPS, you might want to fix that.

JaTochNietDan8• 7 years ago

Fixed that and edited it up a bit.

bollockitis• 7 years ago

The text of You Might Not Need jQuery says the following:

If you're developing a library on the other hand, please take a moment to consider if you actually need jQuery as a dependency.

Maybe I am mistaken but it seems to me that this site targets library developers who use jQuery without realizing that they're forcing it on users as a transitive dependency. It does not seem to apply to end-users writing simple tools.

beders• 7 years ago

I'd like to introduce a new measure: Expected Complexity (EC)

Possible values: --> Static webpage --> There's a Form! --> I can click things and the URL doesn't change! --> I spend a few minutes on this site and click a few things --> I spent a couple hours on this site and click lots of things --> My office hours are spent clicking on things on this site!

How to determine at the start of development what EC value will be reached: Using a crystal ball (as usual)

Pick your technology according to the value of EC.

There's a good chance that (= :jQuery (choose-tech ["There's a Form!", "I can click things and the URL doesn't change!", "I spend a few minutes on this site and click a few things"])

is `true` and that's ok.

gchamonlive• 7 years ago

I have had my share of grief with jquery, but I'm not quite sure it was jquerys fault or the tools built around it. Many a time I had to reimplement stuff like radio button exclusion when a pop-up would render an HTML string as is.

Did anyone have problems like that? What are the jquery limitations I should be aware of?

I am asking because I am mainly backend and infrastructure developer and feel like I have little experience with frontend tools

sandreas• 7 years ago

I'm a bit sceptical about this article... I understand the point... jQuery is a nice place to get started for beginners and see how things have been done in the past and I also HATE the boilerplate with most modern JavaScript-Frameworks, but

I want to build webpages that are fast

I don't think that jQuery is fast... Especially the fact, that jQuery hooks in every event handler to control the possibility to remove all Event handlers is something that is slowing down every app... event if jQuery is hardly used.

use the simplest feasible code

I don't think that code is simple, when it is ONE single function that takes nearly every type as argument with different outcome...

And I don't like that developers could use this article as a justification... especially while modern frameworks like vue.js can also be used without setting up a webpack project...

But: If you read between the lines, there is something to learn ;)

LocalPCGuy2• 7 years ago

is something that is slowing down every app

If that is slowing down your app, something was done wrong.

This comment reads (and feel free to correct me for a wrong assumption) as written by someone that really hasn't used jQuery in a serious production capacity.

zaro• 7 years ago

I didn't know about http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ , but to me it seems very convincing that I need jQuery :)

invalidusernam3• 7 years ago

Exactly. I know I don't need jQuery, but sometimes it's nice to be able to do stuff like make an ajax request as a one liner vs 10+ lines.

Peoples gripes with jQuery come from people importing the entire library to do one thing, like add a class to an element. Sure, in that case it's dumb to load the entire library for that single purpose. But if you're using it for 5 things? 10 things? It quickly becomes worthwhile.

hatch_q2• 7 years ago

https://caniuse.com/#search=fetch For IE, you can use a polyfill if needed.

jeltz• 7 years ago

Yeah, that site makes a really good case for using jQuery.

ape43• 7 years ago

Small detail, what's with the plus in this code from that site:

    last = +new Date();

leeoniya• 7 years ago

converts the date object to a unix timestamp* (int). a + works for coercing stuff to numbers. e.g. +"0.5" is quicker than paraseFloat("0.5") and also saves you from having to know if you need to use parseFloat or parseInt. coersion to strings can also be done by appending to an empty string: "" + 0.5.

* in ms

lewiscollard• 7 years ago

It is a trick to coerce it to an integer.

    >> new Date()
    Date 2019-05-27T12:52:41.932Z
    >> +new Date()
    1558961556913
    >> +"4" // works on anything else :)
    4

thrower123• 7 years ago

If it's not broke, don't change it. I could write more, but I'd just be echoing the post's points.

I think the biggest win would be avoiding all the insane complexity of a modern npm/webpack JS development experience.

robm99x• 7 years ago

I’m still using jquery and bootstrap for mvp web app using, of all things, PHP and Slim Framework which surprisingly is not horrible.

cdubzzz• 7 years ago

The thing that really got me to start thinking twice about jQuery, much more than the youmightnotneed... website, was this performance test for selectors —

https://jsperf.com/getelementbyid-vs-queryselector/25

Carpetsmoker2• 7 years ago

You can build jQuery without the SizzleJS engine and then it'll just use document.querySelectorAll. You can, of course, also still use document.getElementById('foo'), so if you have a specific performance issue you can opt-out for that one function.

marcosdumay• 7 years ago

The slowest function on that tables gives me 900k ops/second. This will not make any difference in a mostly static page.

drikerf• 7 years ago

Sure. But as always. It depends. If you're writing a highly interactive app and your jQuery script starts containing a lot of view state, eventually you'll go mad and probably duplicate a lot of logic on server and client too.

Seeing your app as a function of a data structure/state is then much simpler. Although it will require a bit more thought initially. App = f(s).

Again, it depends. If you're writing static sites and sprinkles will stay sprinkles, jQuery will probably be a solid choice.

scarface74• 7 years ago

The most enjoyable front end development experience I’ve had is jQuery + HandlebarsJS.

Hendrikto• 7 years ago

As always, it comes down to: use an appropriate tool for the job.

Sadly, that‘s not a nice title for your blog post to go viral, so people make posts like "x is dead, long live y", and "why are you still using x?", or "the era of x is over", in which they present very narrow viewpoints, and try to solve every single problem in the world with the hot new fotm framework.

droptablemain• 7 years ago

This is all fine and dandy; use what works for you. However, as many of us have learned when trying to aggressively optimize performance, execution time is generally much longer for jQuery than with vanilla JS. So if you're after high PageSpeed scores, for example, jQuery is the damn devil (or at least one of them).

sgift• 7 years ago

In my experience server-side generated templates lightly sprinkled with “progressive enhancement”-style JavaScript are still the best way to do that. Those apps are easier to develop, tend to be faster, tend to have fewer bugs, and your laptop’s fan won’t wake the neighbours.

Thanks for that part. Really. A heartfelt thank you. Every time I see another "hey, I only want to show you text, but for some reason I thought using one of the modern js frameworks for it is a good idea" pages I feel years older. Instead of showing me text using html they pack that text in js on the server (it usually exists in an html compatible form already), then they shove that JS down the connection, then my browser has to interpret the JS, so it can get the html, which it then has to interpret too. And then, finally, I see my text.

And because all of this is so slow we get techniques like "server-side rendering". The first time I read about server-side rendering I didn't understand what it was: so, you produce the html on the server. And send it to the client. Yes ..? What is the new part? Why is this something that people present as the next savior of the web?

This is some special kind of madness and I wonder when it will stop.

Tade02• 7 years ago

This is some special kind of madness and I wonder when it will stop.

There's light at the end of this tunnel in the form of compilers like Svelte or Stencil.js replacing frameworks.

The improvement here is that since there's no special runtime the bundles are very small, so there isn't a lot of JS to parse.

Also the code you have to write is much shorter comparing to frameworks.

rbanffy• 7 years ago

There's light at the end of this tunnel in the form of compilers like Svelte or Stencil.js replacing frameworks.

I am a bit skeptical that adding more complexity to something that's already much more complex than it should can be a solution.

kangoo1707• 7 years ago

Server-side rendering is the best front-end architecture at the moment. Superior first content paint and is better at SEO than SPA, and have a better architect than MVC.

So in what way does if differ from traditional MVC? In MVC, the final output is HTML strings. Easy example: supposed you have an array of Posts in your controller, and a HTML template. The final result will be the combination of both of them. But when the HTML strings get sent to browser, you lose the array !!! It's gone. The client never receives an actual array, just DOM nodes.

In Front-end framework SSR (NextJS or NuxtJS), what you work with is a component. A component can have data (an array), and the data is pushed (serialize) as-is to browsers. On the browser, you won't ever have to work with low level DOM nodes. You continue to see the component and data in its original form. This is the biggest win of SSR that is easily overlooked.

provolone2• 7 years ago

If you need that array you could just embed a script tag in your html template.

saltminer2• 7 years ago

The worst I've seen is where the main content is served (if you curl the website, you can see the text content is there), but it's hidden by a full-page loading animation which is removed by JS.

ds_• 7 years ago

AMP? (https://amp.dev/documentation/guides-and-tutorials/learn/spe...)

oefrha• 7 years ago

The saving grace in these cases is that often the reader mode would work with the HTML just fine and you don’t need to wait for the useless 3MB JS bundle which you may have blocked. The same reader mode trick sometimes works against subscribe-to-read-the-rest-of-the-article paywalls and no-scroll anti-adblock modals, too.

jabart• 7 years ago

Currently dealing with a situation where a SPA app doesn't work with FB Sharing, because it exepects a set of META/Open Graph tags. So now we are going back to rendering a portion of the HTML on the server to support this.

In JIRA, if I hit enter in the wrong field, it does a post out to somewhere and returns me a weird xml page and I lose my work.

SPA apps are like building a browser, in a browser, and on the server. You lose some built in functionality and have to ship the framework down to the client.

scruple2• 7 years ago

JIRA is a case study in bad UI/UX and web anti-patterns, IMHO. I think my team at work is finally ready to ditch it in favor of basically anything else.

kureikain• 7 years ago

In Jira, I constantly have a fear that I will update wrong thing. Every single click make something editable and the page jump around.

candu• 7 years ago

This is the part that often gets forgotten in these discussions: it shouldn't be "SPA for everything" vs. "vanilla HTML / CSS / JS for everything"; rather, we should be using the most appropriate set of tools for the job.

I've worked on simple static sites, for which I typically lean more on vanilla HTML / CSS with a sprinkling of JS as recommended here. I've also worked on heavy-lifting applications, for which the limitations of this approach quickly become evident; in those cases, I use reactive component frameworks like Vue and React.

But there's also approaches in between! For mid-complexity sites / apps, I've used vanilla HTML / CSS / JS, with some additional Python / Makefile plumbing to generate more repetitive parts. I've also used hybrid approaches, where vanilla HTML / CSS / JS is used for more static parts of the site and Vue is used for more dynamic parts. You can use Vue in full-on SPA mode with "server-side rendering"...but you can also just generate HTML server-side as you would have before, then progressively enhance parts of it with Vue / jQuery / whatever.

I've also used "unfashionable" frameworks like Spring before, simply because it met the client's available in-house expertise. As developers, it's incumbent upon us to step back, assess the task / team / environment at hand, and pick tools accordingly.

brightball2• 7 years ago

Yep. This is one of the reasons that so many people are excited about Phoenix Live View being released. It bridges that gap much farther and let’s you avoid the SPA until you hit the “is absolutely necessary” point.

goostavos• 7 years ago

On a side project I recently tried the middle ground approach and absolutely loved it. There was really only one part of the application that had complex user interactions, so that was the only place that I shipped a React bundle. The rest was just plain ol' templates and HTML.

On the whole, I'd say that I loved it. It is _staggering_ how quickly you can knock pages out when you're not coordinating data representations across different pieces of your app. The static-ness also lets you embrace a kind of UI feature simplicity. Does that form _really_ need live validation, or can we just pop the errors after submit? The latter is the only option unless you wanna (a) either vanilla Javascript or JQuery the interactions or (b) start shipping a React bundle down to this page. And thus, form validation was part of the request/response cycle, which further speeds up development.

It does get a little awkward when a static page starts having dynamic features begin to creep in. You have to decide when to awkwardly cut over to having that page powered by React.

That said, without a framework supporting this kind of development directly, I'm skeptical of how well it would work on a team. I did this style on a solo project, so there was no one complaining about 'mixing technologies' or bemoaning 'why don't we just use React everywhere.' I imagine that the first time we rewrote a page in SPA tech because it picked up enough UX to warrant it, people would be up in arms about how much time we've 'wasted' by not doing it in the first place.

giancarlostoro• 7 years ago

My rule of thumb is if you arent building some social / multimedia type of experience a SPA wont do much for you that you cant get done with HTML and CSS.

applecrazy• 7 years ago

I've made quite complex web apps with pure CDN-imported (i.e. no Webpack/NPM) Vue as a starting point. They work well, are easier to debug, and get the job done faster. Of course, it's a good idea to take that monolithic JS file and split it up into components for easier future work, but I've found that working like this leads to fewer "tooling hell" headaches.

andrei_says_• 7 years ago

AT&T’s website account pages only serve static html. But they are rendered by js and I have to wait looking at a loader after every click.

Why is that?

Why do so many static websites and blogs use SPA technology for all their pages?

It can’t be that it’s just to make me mad (although it works). Are people insane? How does spending 10x the $ and effort for a worse result make sense?

jammygit• 7 years ago

What are the “indications for use” for a SPA?

Bahamut2• 7 years ago

I've seen the flip side of the coin in an app I inherited at work - it turns out server-side rendering can be significantly slower than client side rendering if you're rendering a lot of content, to the point where we hit an automatic timeout. If this app was a fat JS app, we probably wouldn't be trying to decommission it & it probably would load in seconds at worst, but the investment to modernize it/improve performance & scalability so it would meet our users' needs is too much.

brightball2• 7 years ago

That’s true in a lot of cases mainly because of the approach to rendering. So many languages focus on rendering the entire HTML structure before sending the first byte back, specifically so that the page can be wrapped in a cache. This forces a lot of memory allocation to build up strings and parts of strings that takes time on its own, is often repetitive over the same HTML tags and then all of that has to be garbage collected at the end of the request.

The approach taken by Elixir’s Phoenix framework is so fast because it avoids all of those pitfalls. Most people have to do a double take when they see the speed comparisons.

Here’s a great write up: https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/elixir-and-io-lists-part-2...

andrewf• 7 years ago

Your older app may be serializing a lot of work. For instance, it could be issuing 10 SQL queries, one after another, which take 200ms each to answer - that's 2s total just waiting for the database. Compare to a JS client which issues 10 backend API calls, each being a 200ms request from the server's perspective (and the JS may parallelize many of those requests)

If this is a factor, rearchitecting the backend wouldn't necessarily be easier than an SPA rewrite. But it's not a fundamental limitation of server-side rendering.

baddox2• 7 years ago

Of course I agree that if you’re only showing text with a few interactive enhancements, you can probably get away with jquery. The trouble is that too often a few enhancements turns into a few more enhancements, then a lot of enhancements, and then you end up with a huge mess of jquery spaghetti. It quickly becomes comical to claim that jquery would result in fewer bugs than pretty much any post-backbone UI library or framework you can think of.

LocalPCGuy2• 7 years ago

I don't use jQuery much these days, but you can absolutely write quality jQuery code that is well structured and architected. It doesn't need to devolve into spaghetti code. It doesn't have guard rails like some frameworks might, and it's base examples don't really promote non-spaghetti code, but it's not that difficult for experienced JS devs to write good, high-quality jQuery code.

azdacha• 7 years ago

Why stop now when we got so much out of it? Maybe we will have even better solutions coming now that we have learnt so much.

It's like "Please stop enhancing stuff it's good enough" - I like to enhance stuff, yeah it has costs but you can master them. That's definitely not the end of it. I hope we will do better. Maybe your "problems" will be resolved as well!

udfalkso• 7 years ago

Elixir/Phoenix’s new LiveView seems to really hit this sweet spot

JustSomeNobody• 7 years ago

If all the cool kids are doing a thing, you have to do that thing else you’re not a cool kid.

There’s no other explanation.

geekamongus2• 7 years ago

As someone who does application security assessments for a living, the biggest problem with jQuery is the lingering, outdated, vulnerable versions that are pervasive (1.x and 2.x in particular) in so many applications. I don't care if you decide to use jQuery or not, just have a plan to maintain it and be able to update it without breaking everything, should the need arise.

/preaching

Carpetsmoker2• 7 years ago

Is this a problem that's worse with jQuery than with other libraries such as vue.js, angular, react? (genuine question, not a comeback)

peterangular• 7 years ago

Just curious what vulns specifically you're referring to?

geekamongus2• 7 years ago

https://snyk.io/vuln/npm:jquery

madeofpalk• 7 years ago

I'm curious - what are the types of vulnerabilities that lie in the client-side jQuery?

provolone2• 7 years ago

If you allow unchecked data to be stored & retrieved there are some XSS vulns in older versions. Ideally this would be prevented in a sane environment.

settsu• 7 years ago

I’d be curious to see how many people have a cached copy of jQuery from one of the popular CDNs and what the overall real world effects are of that.

(That got me thinking of another potentially interesting analysis/discussion about the distribution of jQuery versions being used…)

ehnto8• 7 years ago

The given example of element.nextSibling is a great example of what jQuery gets wrong. In jQuery, that's going to be $(el).next();

On first encountering $(el).next(), you need to answer a bunch of questions. Next what? Why is this a function and not a property of the object? Why not call it getNextSibling? What the hell is $() doing?

element.nextSibling is very clear. It's the next sibling of the element. It's idiomatic javascript, and it follows a good naming convention, which is a skill that is language agnostic.

The author is also conflating their time learning as a pro for jQuery. Had they learned vanilla javascript first, their point about not knowing which nextSibling to use would be moot. What they are referring to here is an idiosyncrasy, and jQuery is jam packed with them. The difference is they have learned them already.

If you learn jQuery today, you're not learning core JavaScript, and considering the trajectory of web technologies you'll be doing yourself a disservice not to use that learning time on actual JavaScript that you could use in future tools. jQuery isn't a bad choice if you know it already, but if you are a new developer do yourself a favor and learn the foundation it's built on first.

dmitriid9• 7 years ago

Had they learned vanilla javascript first

Vanilla Javascript has nothing to do with DOM APIs. DOM APIs is just another interface/library/abstraction that you need to learn after you've learned JS.

If you learn jQuery today, you're not learning core JavaScript

DOM APIs are not core Javascript.

ehnto8• 7 years ago

You are right, but it's kind of beside the point given the context is web libraries. jQuery is built on top of the DOM API, so it's a library on top of an abstraction. It is just as simple to learn, so why not learn the core abstraction, with which all other DOM based abstractions are built from?

jQuery will eventually go away while the DOM API is part of the web's core stack. Maybe it changes over time, but there will likely be a DOM API as long as there are HTML based browsers.

arp2423• 7 years ago

element.nextSibling is very clear. It's the next sibling of the element. It's idiomatic javascript, and it follows a good naming convention, which is a skill that is language agnostic.

The only catch here is that it will give you the wrong answer, and that you should (almost) never use it since it includes whitespace nodes, which you practically never want. This is why nextElementSibling exists (get the next sibling that is an element).

As for the naming: this is an old old discussion we will never agree on, but I think that in the context of a DOM traversal library "next" is pretty clear.

The author is also conflating their time learning as a pro for jQuery. Had they learned vanilla javascript first, their point about not knowing which nextSibling to use would be moot.

Your assumptions about my knowledge couldn't be more wrong. I spent years writing plain JavaScript. I even wrote a jQuery alternative back in the day as I didn't like various aspects of it (I think I was the only user), before giving in and "just using jQuery". I still don't like those same aspects, but it's not bad enough to use something else.

I have also, recently, tried very hard to use plain JS, and this post is the result.

if you are a new developer do yourself a favor and learn the foundation it's built on first.

This is just a variant of the old "kids these days, they just learn Python instead of REAL development with C, they don't even know the difference between the stack and heap!!" Okay, shrug. In the meanwhile, those "kids" are solving real problems, so well... Programming isn't some kind of intellectual exercise, it's a tool to solve problems.

ehnto8• 7 years ago

The only catch here is that it will give you the wrong answer, and that you should (almost) never use it since it includes whitespace nodes

But that's perfect, because it does what it says. If I wanted to get the next element only I would used the correctly named nextElementSibling. How do you get the next text node sibling in jQuery?

Your assumptions about my knowledge couldn't be more wrong.

My apologies. I was reading between the lines and I guess I got it wrong.

This is just a variant of the old "kids these days...

Not at all, it's advice for the future of the web which will be more plain javascript based but within frameworks like React and Vue. They're grabbing more and more of the job market share. I am being pragmatic here, knowing jQuery won't help you navigate the world the "kids" are busy building right now with frontend SPA frameworks.

jQuery obviously has it's place, and if you prefer using it then no one can stop you. I just don't agree that it's better, and I don't believe it's as useful to know for new developers with the way the industry is changing.

mythrwy2• 7 years ago

With $(el).next() you _can_ specify the next "what" if you chose, i.e $(el).next('span'). Otherwise it's next sibling, sort of how it appears.

`Why is this a function and not a property of the object?`

1)Who cares? 2)Possibly because it's more than just getNextSibling as example above shows.

So shorter syntax, more functionality, what's the fuss? 30kb?

ehnto8• 7 years ago

element.querySelector('span') is the equivalent. Just as elegant, one fewer function call.

1) People like me care obviously. It's all bike-shedding anyway, so it's just a point of discussion.

2) nextSibling and nextElementSibling are two different properties, and you can't do the former in jQuery at all. In a typical usage you would need to do $('.my-class')[0].nextSibling, or in other words, dig down to the native DOM API anyway.

So less functionality, less clear syntax, 30kb!

fareesh• 7 years ago

Is there a plan (or is it possible) for jQuery to look at going with some kind of modular approach where you can just import the stuff that you / your plugins want?

I know there are libraries that claim to have 100% parity with jQuery's selector library. Are there any ones that are making this claim reliably?

lioeters• 7 years ago

Zepto comes to mind: https://zeptojs.com/#modules

cptrp2101• 7 years ago

I think, as with anything else, it's important we understand the tools we are using. I started with jQuery and the problem was (like many others) I learned it before I actually learned javascript. I've since backtracked and dug into vanilla JS so I can have a better understanding of what my code does.

Since then, I haven't found a situation where I miss jQuery. However, I don't damn anyone who uses it (beyond jokey arguments with the wordpress dev on my team).

It seems like this opinion won't fit in well here, but at this point I find vanilla more than enough for anything where Vue or React will be overkill. However, I'm obviously biased as a front-end app dev and am open to seeing what other people have to say.

I'm not sure what to think about the server side vs. client side comments in the article since that fall outside my area of knowledge.

h1d2• 7 years ago

You will soon come back to using jQuery again thinking what the point of just saving 30KB by letting your code become longer.

Bahamut2• 7 years ago

Doubtful - 30 kB minified & gzipped is a lot of code, and the fact that jQuery doesn't help with your code organization/keeping code DRY much is a huge negative.

edanm• 7 years ago

Pages like You might not need jQuery try to sell the idea that it’s easy to ditch jQuery[...]

I wasn't aware of http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/, but that's an inaccurate summary of what the website tries to do and really does it a disservice.

It very specifically says, in the first sentence on the site, that you should use jQuery for regular development - it's specifically talking about people developing libraries, and encouraging them to not force other people to load jQuery as an extra dependency, which is a very reasonable position. And I don't think it's trying to sell how easy plain JS is, as much as just giving translation code from common jQuery code to plain code, so that if you want to go that route, it'll be easier to do so!

Here, I'll just quote the first text on the page (emphasis mine):

"jQuery and its cousins are great, and by all means use them if it makes it easier to develop your application.

If you're developing a library on the other hand, please take a moment to consider if you actually need jQuery as a dependency. Maybe you can include a few lines of utility code, and forgot the requirement. If you're only targeting more modern browsers, you might not need anything more than what the browser ships with."

Chazprime• 7 years ago

I’m pretty much in agreement with this, to a point. jQuery is a reliable and fast way to make a age do just about anything, except maintaining state.

The KISS principle is practically unheard of in web development lately - I see teams using more “hip” technologies like React or Angular for simple sites, but then the complexity of the app increases considerably for not that much in the way of gains. Sometimes simpler really is better

masswerk2• 7 years ago

Something seldom considered while discussing the use of libraries and frameworks: green computing.

Mind that you're multiplying any overhead thousandfold or even millionfold when transferring the overhead to each client connecting to the service (including several instances of network infrastructure). So,"how much effort it can be to use vanilla JS", – it may be well worth the extra effort, once, on a single side of the communication chain.

h1d2• 7 years ago

Your assumption that everyone can write more efficient code than jQuery isn't making sense.

masswerk2• 7 years ago

It's certainly a matter of balance: if you need just a simple functionality or a single effect, loading (and compiling) the entirety of jQuery may not be the wisest. Similarly, I've seen d3.js loaded just to get a canvas element by 4 lines of code, where a single vanilla line would have done.

(Edit: Notably, my argument was about the effort involved.)

sedatk• 7 years ago

jQuery is an idiomatic DSL but far from intuitive (does “after” imply a DOM modifying action or just a selector?). So I find it okay that browsers have a verbose API as it makes it clearer. Bare DOM API is nowhere close to jQuery in terms of practicality though.

viach• 7 years ago

Idk in regards of how better the code can be structured with React or Vue, but opening apps based in these frameworks makes similar effect to starting Monero miner locally.

javinpaul• 7 years ago

You are not alone mate, I am also using jQuery in 2019 :-) It's one of my favorite JavaScript libraries.

nickjj• 7 years ago

I still use jquery too and it doesn't have to be a tangled mess of insanity nowadays.

Webpack + ES6 modules + jquery is a reasonable option IMO if you like the idea of server rendered templates with sprinkles of Javascript.

Plus, with the way things are heading with certain web frameworks (like Phoenix), you can do really interesting things like push the diffs of your server rendered templates over a websocket channel without having to write any user land Javascript yourself, and on the initial page load it just gets served without Javascript using the same templates. It's like the best of both worlds (super fast feeling apps, SEO just works and you don't have to duplicate templates and logic on both the client and server).

unfunco• 7 years ago

Pages like You might not need jQuery try to sell the idea that it’s easy to ditch jQuery, but the very first example is a good reason to use jQuery: one line of trivial jQuery code gets replaced with 10 lines of vanilla JS code!

There's no such thing as one line of jQuery, it's 10K lines before you add your one line to do that one thing that 10 lines of vanilla JS code can do.

rlv-dan• 7 years ago

True. But it's 9 more lines that you have to write yourself. And some people prefer being productive rather than figuring out how to do it in plain JS for the sake of it.

pier252• 7 years ago

To give you an idea where I come from... I started doing front end in the late 90s, and for the past 5 or so years I've been mostly doing SPAs with Vue, React, Inferno, and Angular.

I'm done with SPAs and the whole modern front end workflow. If there was a solid benefit to a SPA it would make sense to endure all the complex development, ever changing ecosystem, etc, but in the vast majority of cases there is no benefit. Users don't care about SPAs, some of the most successful biggest websites are not SPAs (Amazon, Ebay, Wikipedia, etc).

A static site generator like Jekyll with some sprinkled JS offers a much better experience. When that is not enough a good old server side rendered app with sprinkled JS is the next step I will consider.

There are some perfectly valid use cases for SPAs but those are rare.

And don't get me started on libraries/frameworks figuring it out as they go along. jQuery has had a stable API and methodology like forever. React has made major changes in only 5 years. From createElement, to JSX, to classes, to stateless components, to hooks, and only god knows what they will come up with next year.

noir_lord2• 7 years ago

Vue gets that part pretty right at least, they work hard not to break things unnecessarily across versions and never in version (in my experience).

Nothing like jQuery's track record but they don't have the history yet to call on.

pier252• 7 years ago

Yeah, you can still use the component object notation in Vue 2.

AFAIK they will keep that in Vue 3 too but the team is moving onto a new hook-like API after cancelling the class based components.

Asmod4n• 7 years ago

When you are done designing your Webpage, disable JavaScript, disable CSS (if your browser supports that) and check that you are still able to grasp what you want to present your visitors.

If you then don't find the relevant information in the first second, congratulations, you just made a page which is useless to people with old Screen-readers.

I may be old fashioned in this regard, but i only see JS as a Add-on to the text you want to get out and only use it to add functionality which would be impossible with html and css alone. e.G. to give a hint when there are new articles to read, or when a article has changed.

Comment sections for example don't require JS at all, but you can use JS to make it needless to reload the page after you send that HTML Form.

macspoofing2• 7 years ago

When you are done designing your Webpage

What do you mean by 'webpage'? Because SPAs are really applications that are served over http(s) and executed by the browser.

I may be old fashioned in this regard, but i only see JS as a Add-on

You are. People want to build applications served over the web instead of installed locally. In those cases JS is not an add-on. In fact, the DOM is an add-on as it is nothing more than a layout manager and UI component set.

Sounds like you just want webpages to be nothing more than a medium for publishing text content in which case CSS and HTML is all you need ... but that ship has sailed in early 2000s.

Raphmedia• 7 years ago

I've been doing front-end for years and still use jQuery for almost 90% of my projects. It's not because I'm resistant to change, I've done my share of SPA style projects.

Simply said, jQuery is still the best plug-n-play solution for most small projects.

The numbers are not against jQuery. There's no real gains to skipping it. At 27.77 KB (Minified and Zopflinated file size) it's not as if it's weighting down your pages. On the rare occasions I actually come across something done faster in raw JavaScript (often because jQuery has some heavier polyfills), I simply use the raw JavaScript in my jQuery project.

zackbloom• 7 years ago

I'm one of the original creators of You Might Not Need jQuery. Most of the examples still date back to 2014, with modern JS they get much simpler and shorter (the fetch API and async/await help tremendously in the first example cited).

degobah2• 7 years ago

Thanks for your work. OP maybe didn't read the first two paragraphs of YMNNJ, which clearly states:

jQuery and its cousins are great, and by all means use them if it makes it easier to develop your application.
If you're developing a library on the other hand, please take a moment to consider if you actually need jQuery as a dependency.

RyanShook• 7 years ago

Great reminder that old does not equal bad!

losvedir2• 7 years ago

I've seen a few apps that began as vanilla JS or jQuery updated to use react as the requirements grew and the "simple" JS started crumbling under its own weight. So I'm sympathetic to the idea of just starting with a framework from the get-go.

That's why I'm excited to see how Phoenix's LiveView turns out. It gives the "server side rendered, sprinkling of JS" approach more room to go in. It won't replace something like Google Maps, but there's a whole class of applications that would previously be on the border of the decision between react and server side that can be pushed into server side.

thrownaway954• 7 years ago

It's a mature library that takes the pain out of cross browser compatibility (yes... you read that right, cross browser compatibility is still a thing in 2019) and the verboseness of using native JS (yes... you read THAT right, using native JS is verbose), so why wouldn't you want to use it?

Oh and on more thing... If you're not using jQuery but instead using native JS with polyfills... YOU ARE A MORON AND DOING IT WRONG and should just you jQuery.

macspoofing2• 7 years ago

yes... you read that right, cross browser compatibility is still a thing in 2019

When it comes to manipulating the DOM, I'm not sure it actually is anymore - especially if you can cut out IE11 (and IE11 isn't too bad).

What would be an example of cross-browser compatibility that JQuery takes care of that would be a pain to do with DOM apis.

forgot-my-pw• 7 years ago

When you don't have to support Internet Explorer, using ES6 (fetch) is nice enough. When you need to support IE, it's best to use jQuery.

hatch_q2• 7 years ago

It's not. It's better to use fetch polyfill.

qwerty456127• 7 years ago

el.insertAdjacentElement('afterend', other) seems a way more intuitive than $(el).after(other). I don't code JavaScript yet the meaning of the first is intuitively obvious to me while I can only know what the second form does because you've told me.

umanage• 7 years ago

This is pretty much the reason I still use jQuery too. Although JavaScript now offers much of the jQuery functionality as built-ins, the very concise syntax that jQuery offers is more convenient to use.

Existenceblinks• 7 years ago

Javascript libraries ecosystem in post jquery era is also inefficient.

More duplicated efforts on making reusable uis because they (React/Vue/Svelte/Elm/Ember etc) don't mean to integrate well with each other. Mostly they live their own world. Nothing integrates well with server rendering approach because most of them are based on virtual dom or compiler, vm that takes over the whole ui containers.

When you change a frontend language/lib/framework, your design system also need to change. All of your branded ui components need to be reinvented although some people just wrap libs such as Sortablejs, Select2 with their favorite js thing.

I've experiment Phoenix LiveView with a bunch of mentioned js lib/framework/language (above), nothing really integrates well for production uses. Vanilla js is still best bet for working with server-side rendered html (Unpolyjs or Stimulusjs is nice, but it only serves small purposes)

I hope there would be more js that works with good old html that you are already rendering.

jesusthatsgreat• 7 years ago

If it works for you and is easily maintained by whoever is looking after it, great.

In my experience, sooner or later you're gonna want modern functionality / user experience and you're in for a world of pain trying to hack it together with jQuery.

These days I'd only use jQuery for sites where I'm the sole developer and the project won't change much over time. Or for legacy projects where the cost of moving everything to an SPA wouldn't be worth it.

If you're not the only developer on a project and the project is liable to morph over time, jQuery will be a costly mistake.

degobah2• 7 years ago

Pages like "You might not need jQuery" try to sell the idea that it’s easy to ditch jQuery. ... good reasons to not use jQuery: if you’re writing code that you want to be re-used by others...

Literally the first thing youmightnotneedjquery.com says is:

jQuery and its cousins are great, and by all means use them if it makes it easier to develop your application.
If you're developing a library on the other hand, please take a moment to consider if you actually need jQuery as a dependency.

drinchev• 7 years ago

Hardest part to get rid of jQuery was the $.ajax function. Happily now, we can all use the fetch API with some extra polyfills, but pretty much that's it.

`el.insertAdjacentElement`, really? Yeah if you carry jQuery thinking with you, you will probably want to translate the code literally and find substitute for everything. No... You can just use to recreate the part of the DOM that needs to be updated and replace it. It's faster to write and easier to read.

Anyway most of the arguments are not considering, vanilla JS + webpack / babel es6 + npm packages. In a world where side-effects are not well accepted anymore using jQuery is nightmare to maintain.

What's this fuzz about btw, I thought this argument was over?

jb3689• 7 years ago

I like the progressive enhancement approach using a small amount of JS, and I'm fine with jQuery. The thing is that I don't _use_ very much of jQuery. Rather than pull in all of jQuery you could just define your own `get` and `post` to abstract the XHR verbosity. No need to pull in a giant library to do that

pizza_r0b• 7 years ago

one line of trivial jQuery code gets replaced with 10 lines of vanilla JS code!

Actually those 10 lines are replaced by the entire JQuery library.

Aaron-goshine• 7 years ago

Fist let me say this thread has turned out to be possible the most important thread in regards to modern web development.

Single page Applications (SPA) and frame works that are used to develop such applications are over used which have led to a whole host of problems in the software engineering industry, I truly believe that if you are building software solutions 90% percent of the time you will be building them to solve business problems, so that should be of paramount importance not necessarily the latest shines concept and tools, especially unproven tools.

A very high percentage of the developers you will interview will be using front end frame work such as Reactjs, Anuglar, VueJs ... etc as a substitute for truly understanding the the native technologies and standards support by various user agents.

The consequences of this is usually very expensive for business while resulting in software products that are convoluted, complex and unstable; I have seen this too many times.

The JavaScript eco system at the moment is littered with these kind problems, pseudo stars developers who want to re invent the wheel (without first understanding the existing mechanics), not only is reinventing the wheel already an idea that has been frowned upon for thousands of years, in the context of software development most of the times it turns out to be a much buggier and less efficient solution.

I have encountered SPAs that have been built out to be so complicated and convoluted to say the least; in order to support server side rendering, hot module reloading, dynamic DOM refresh, Virtual DOM… etc. speaking as if these concepts are some holy gifts from the gods, and when you ask the most fundamental question what are the business values behind all of these concepts, there are no good answers.

tempodox• 7 years ago

So, what is a good jQuery replacement nowadays, for just XHR and a bit of CSS manipulation?

Why I'm still using jQuery

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