It seems like a good idea to me. or add the additional features to Javascript itself?
+5
A:
jQuery exists just because they (browser makers) couldn't agree on common standard.
mbq
2010-07-19 07:20:59
I say it's more about incomplete implementation of standards and emergence of techniques not originally, or at all, part of any standard. Also, there are approaches which are more convenient than what is provided by the standards, e.g. wrappers around getElementById.
George Marian
2010-07-20 01:24:13
@George Yup, still I didn't mention why they couldn't agree. Sadly the same mechanism what made JS develop so fast also caused it to be indeed so hard to use generally that it now needs frameworks. And the same is happening with CSS...
mbq
2010-08-27 09:44:47
A:
There's also the issue of versioning. Certain sites and extensions of jQuery require a certain version of jQuery. Right now it's up to the application to decide which version to use.
reko_t
2010-07-19 07:21:43
but you could set up a declaration system similar to HTML doctypes and include various version libraries in the browser installation - only issue then is the lag between jQuery releases and browser support
HorusKol
2010-07-19 07:25:43
@HorusKol - I don't see the lag as an issue either. The actual functioning of the browser has nothing to do with the library so it can be automatically updated whenever a new release of the library is out. The browser vendor doesn't need to push a software update just to do that.
Anurag
2010-07-19 07:47:05
+1
A:
You can consider jQuery to be a JavaScript plug-in. And browsers do not ship with plug-ins, otherwise the purpose of plug-ins would be irrelevant.
Prutswonder
2010-07-19 07:23:16
A:
Probably because browsers are hard to update. Some freature of JQuery may eventually make their way into javascript, and I believe some of it has just recently. (well the idea's anyways) It takes years to add a feature to something like javascript, where the JQuery library can just release a new version.
There is actually a firebug or firefox plug in that allows you to inject JQuery into the page.. but thats just a development tool
WalterJ89
2010-07-19 07:25:49
@Psytronic: I think he's referring to [FireQuery](http://firequery.binaryage.com/)
Dean Harding
2010-07-19 07:30:11
Thanking you muchly, saves me navigating to sites which I know use it.
Psytronic
2010-07-19 07:34:04
+12
A:
Because it's just one library of many. It may be popular but it's far from being the only choice. And it would also cause it to freeze at a particular version and make improvements much slower.
Plus there is little advantage anyway. It's fairly small and you can set it to be cachable indefinably by the brower so it will only be downloaded once anyway - if you have a new version it will have a new filename, so there is no harm in making it never expire.
John Burton
2010-07-19 07:25:51
In addition to this, if use a "global" CDN like the google one to deliver the jQuery library then it's likely that jQuery would *already* exist in the browser's cache (cause everybody else is using the same CDN) so there'd be virtually no benefit at all.
Dean Harding
2010-07-19 07:32:00
+1
A:
Plugins get updated more often than browsers - within a week the browser version of jQuery would be out of date :)
Neurofluxation
2010-07-19 15:43:46