Flutterby™! : jQuery Poisoning 2013-04-01 12:53:44.294043+00

jQuery Poisoning

2013-04-01 12:53:44.294043+00 by meuon 4 comments

I'm in Javascript mode right now for some web interface tweaks. Once I get into it, I actually like playing with Javascript for controlling a web interface. It's kinda fun. As I Google for some clues, I'm noticing a lot of people are showing jQuery techniques as answers to questions asked about simple JavaScript techniques. jQuery is chocolate covered raspberry awesomeness when you want the whole box, but sometimes all you need is a little sugar and I'm concerned that as fragmented and terrible as Javascript's support and documentation is compared to other languages, this is just confusing matters more.

I've pretty well mentally filed this under "ships, sailed". jQuery is so much a given for most web guys my age and under (let's round down a touch and say "30 and under") that I just sort of assume it's defining an API which will eventually be subsumed into the language standard itself.

I liked Prototype better, back when there was any question about long-term dominance, and there are a lot of sort of intermuddled problems with alleged "best practice" right now that won't be sorted out in any particularly healthy way for a while (I'm looking at you, require.js) but we sure could have done worse than jQuery.

#Comment Re: made: 2013-04-02 02:25:30.522941+00 by: meuon [edit history]

Javascript variable scope is just plain insane. In one place I am writing a value to a hidden field so another function can read the value. I am fixing it, but it allowed me to finish up the main functionality without cracking that nut.

I think one of the things that pushed jQuery uptick is that there's been a lot of browser-specific shenanigans in how various DOM aspects were implemented that jQuery provided a unified interface for. I don't know how true that is any more, but that was certainly a big portion of what I thought the earlier push for jQuery was.