[catch23]

we wrote something exactly like yours for corporate customers and although I love jQuery, we decided it was best to write it with just straight-up javascript. It was less code than I thought it would be considering how quick & dirty jQuery lets us do things.

Also, if you need to do something like the jQuery css selector style stuff, you might want to look at sizzle by jeresig. It clocks in at 4kb which isn't too big of an overhead.