Prototype or jQuery for DOM manipulation (client-side dynamic content)

Question

I need to know which of these two JavaScript frameworks is better for client-side dynamic content modification for known DOM elements (by id), in terms of performance, memory usage, etc.:

• Prototype's $('id').update(content)
• jQuery's jQuery('#id').html(content)

EDIT: My real concerns are clarified at the end of the question.

BTW, both libraries coexist with no conflict in my app, because I'm using RichFaces for JSF development, that's why I can use "jQuery" instead of "$".

I have at least 20 updatable areas in my page, and for each one I prepare content (tables, option lists, etc.), based on some user-defined client-side criteria filtering or some AJAX event, etc., like this:

var html = [];
int idx = 0;
...
html[idx++] = '<tr><td class="cell"><span class="link" title="View" onclick="myFunction(';
html[idx++] = param;
html[idx++] = ')"></span>';
html[idx++] = someText;
html[idx++] = '</td></tr>';
...

So here comes the question, which is better to use:

// Prototype's
$('myId').update(html.join(''));
// or jQuery's
jQuery('#myId').html(html.join(''));

Other needed functions are hide() and show(), which are present in both frameworks. Which is better? Also I'm needing to enable/disable form controls, and to read/set their values.

Note that I know my updatable area's id (I don't need CSS selectors at this point). And I must tell that I'm saving these queried objects in some data structure for later use, so they are requested just once when the page is rendered, like this:

MyData = {div1:jQuery('#id1'), div2:$('id2'), ...};
...
div1.update('content 1');
div2.html('content 2');

So, which is the best practice?

EDIT: Clarifying, I'm mostly concerned about:

• Memory usage by these saved objects (it seems to me that jQuery objects add too much overhead), while OTOH my DOM elements are already modified by Prototype's extensions (loaded by default by Richfaces).
• Performance (time) and memory leakage (garbage collection for replaced elements?) when updating the DOM. From the source code, I could see that Prototype replaces the innerHTML and does something with inline scripts. jQuery seems to free memory when calling "empty()" before replacing content.

Please correct me if needed...

Answer 1

I would go for jQuery. Prototype used to modify default JS objects, which is fine but it means you have to be careful. I believe this is no longer the case though. JQuery also has a large plugin repository and the jquery UI extension for widgets. Btw. With JQuery you can use the familiar dollar sign as well.