[DuncanIdaho]

Your comment is purely academic at its best and pretentious at its worst.

There is a good real life problem for jQuery style and your so called anti patterns are in fact the main feature and sole point of existence for jQuery.

Once could argue that jQuery God object replaces not one half assed implementation of DOM God object, but at least four (IE DOM, FF DOM, WebKit DOM, Opera DOM).

I agree that in a fair world jQuery wouldn't even exist. Any problems that it brings to the table I will gladly solve, sice my brain has a lot of better stuff to do than to memorize all the bugs and quirks of all the stupid browser engines out there.

So while you real developer bunch smugly program your assembly, I will gladly carry the flag of an untermensch programmer and just ship the goddamn product. I know my co-workers and clients like me for not coming up with a new framework for every job I do.

[wavephorm]

The OP asked, from an academic standpoint, whether jQuery should be used. My answer is no, and I gave the reasons. To extrapolate further, JQuery is for "developers" who don't know what a subroutine is. Designers love it because they can cut and paste unrelated snippets of code without worrying about architecture. People who overuse JQuery generally avoid any type of architecture in whatever they're building. And although it's possible to ship a product with half-understood jQuery snippets it does not necessarily make that person a real developer.