jQuery: » Building a Slimmer jQuery.
jQuery sometimes gets knocked for it’s popularity, as many things do once a certain degree of popularity is reached. One of the most common digs I hear with jQuery surrounds filesize. File size is our number one enemy as front end developers (insert IE joke here) and jQuery has definitely grown over time.
I’m one of those people that tends to stray away from things when they get super duper popular. The “market” tends to become utterly flooded with people trying to get the most bang for their buck which results in lots of redundancy and lots of ridiculousness.
jQuery has avoided that for me. I still to this day love working with jQuery, and it’s popularity and activity has turned it into one of my most valuable tools. The people behind it are smarter than I could ever hope to be and it thrills me to hear that the focus for subsequent versions continue to refine based on the needs of the community and the users of jQuery (read: everyone on the Internet and the Internet herself).
There are lots of good things to look forward to, and this blog post about upcoming changes should serve as a reminder that although jQuery has become extremely prevalent, that’s no excuse to get lazy with keeping up with changes to the code base.