Actually, looking over the new Web Animation API, it looks like jQuery doesn't even offer much of an advantage for animations as long as you're targeting new browsers that have the Web Animation API (yes, I was referring to the animation support built into jQuery).
Ah, ok. Yes, there are much better options out there than using the animation jQuery offers. At minimum you can use CSS3 transitions and animations before even getting to the Web Animation API. They would likely serve most needs nicely for regular day-to-day sites.
If one really wants to use the jQuery animation options, there are plugins that will try to shift them to CSS3 options instead, but keeping the same syntax.
> Yes, there are much better options out there than using the animation jQuery offers.
No doubt. I haven't used jQuery to speak of in the past 2 years, and the only time I've found myself missing it was when I needed to do some simple animation and wasn't using a library like d3 that could do it just as easily or easier.
And yes, I mentioned CSS animations in this same thread. It's what I've been using in production for animation for the past 2+ years, although it sometimes feels wrong to animate things in JS by adding and removing classes from an element.