[olliej]

I remember years ago (when I was still active in browser dev) having to argue with people who wanted jquery to be embedded in the browser and/or be part of the DOM spec.

I'd like to imagine that this kind of article would help people understand why browsers don't just do that and instead try to develop general APIs that enable frameworks to grow and evolve or simply be replaced as new dev models spring into being.

<grumbling>

Consider this: jQuery needed a bunch of DOM operations to be very fast and have certain behaviors (it's a long time ago, but iirc there were selectors, property apis, certain kinds of nodelist behaviour). Multiple webdevs proposed build jQuery APIs into the browser, so rather than making the underlying operations fast, we'd just have the critical path implemented natively inside the browser. While that would have solved some performance problems it would not have helped any other framework.

By instead making those core functionality faster, and providing general APIs for the things jQuery needed, other frameworks could also make use of them.

My hope is that by seeing these posts (which are honestly tending toward EoL notices) people will remember than no one library is ever likely to be permanent, and will stop asking for browser to just include the libraries internally.

</grumbling>