What do you consider a reasonable reason to build something as a jQuery plugin as opposed to pure-js? or do you believe jQuery plugins are redundant by default?
I personally find it odd to create every component as a jquery plugin. To me, it makes more sense to write a plugin only when you're extending jquery core functionality itself in some way.
As far as "extending" goes though, it's not always clear. Is a date picker extending jquery's core? I personally think not, but there has evolved an expectation that every web component must be initialized like so:
$('#container').doSomething();
So I suppose a lot of people do it that way just to have a familiar look to their API, or even just to show up in listing as a jquery plugin.
Basically, this function is just an onMouseOver event, which then inspects the element and displays text from the "desc" tab in the right place.
I've been thinking for a while that it would be nice if we could add events to the CSS syntax, something like:
a[desc] {
onMouseOver: asideFunction();
}
I _kind_ of worry that this is subverting the purpose of the css, but since it also handles hover and selected behaviour, it seems like the line isn't well-drawn anyway as to where styling ends and where behaviour begins.
Just interested.