[technojunkie]

For those of you who are curious what drives jQuery in 2024 and beyond, you need to remember that WordPress is still more than 1/3 of the web, and the majority of installations and so many plugins critically rely on jQuery. Yes, seriously.

Any advances to removing deprecated APIs or functions are great. jQuery will probably be around dominantly on the web for years to come.

[ecshafer]

Also, jQuery is awesome.

People have been in love with the overly complex and fancy javascript frameworks for the last 15 years or so. But jQuery doing dynamic binding to dynamically generated forms for some error states and maybe an ajax calls is literally all the javascript you need in 99% of web pages and the rest is overkill.

The industry is going to move away from the complexities to React and towards more of this simplicity with htmx, phoenix live view, ruby on rails turbo, and yes just jQuery.

[tipiirai]

Second to that: jQuery is awesome.

Or more specifically: the idea that websites can be built with vanilla HTML, CSS, and _optional_ JS. jQuery embraces progressive enhancement and separation of concerns pattern, which is quite the opposite of how websites are built these days. Web development starts with 10+ React import statements for components, CSS, images, and whatnot. JavaScript is a must, not optional.

[p-e-w]

One website that almost always gets mentioned when people talk about jQuery today is "You might not need jQuery" (https://youmightnotneedjquery.com/).

That site is the best ad for jQuery I've ever seen. For almost every task it describes, the jQuery code is shorter, cleaner, and more intuitive than the vanilla "modern" JS one.

And that's after almost 20 years, and I don't know how many billions of dollars invested into advancing JavaScript.

[Finbarr]

This is incredible and such a great ad for jQuery. It's almost as if the creator(s) built that site ironically. So many examples are way clearer and easier in jQuery, like this one:

  JQUERY:
  $(el).toggle();

  IE8+:
  function toggle(el) {
    if (el.style.display == 'none') {
      el.style.display = '';
    } else {
      el.style.display = 'none';
    }
  }

Gotta love that "modern" triple attribute repetition.

From: https://youmightnotneedjquery.com/#toggle

[piaste]

> It's almost as if the creator(s) built that site ironically.

No, the site's advice is simply more narrow and fine-grained than a blunt 'never use jquery'. From the front page:

> jQuery and its cousins are great, and by all means use them if it makes it easier to develop your application.

> If you're developing a library on the other hand, please take a moment to consider if you actually need jQuery as a dependency. Maybe you can include a few lines of utility code, and forgo the requirement.

This seems eminently reasonable to me. For a website, adding a jquery dependency costs little and you get much nicer, more maintainable code.

But for a library, every transitive dependency introduces the possibility of future version conflicts for applications that depend on it. And at the same time, library code shouldn't need to change and grow nearly as much as application code.

So library authors should strongly consider forsaking mere convenience for the sake of reducing dependency baggage. This isn't even JS-specific advice, it applies to most ecosystems.

[extra88]

A more modern solution would be to use classList.toggle() or toggleAttribute(hidden).

[mschuster91]

> Gotta love that "modern" triple attribute repetition.

You can golf it down a bit:

    el.style.display=el.style.display == 'none' ? '' : 'none';

[OJFord]

Surely

    el.style.display = el.style.display ? 'none' : ''

(after toggling we've already obliterated any possible third value for it anyway, doesn't seem significant)

[anakaine]

Even though I can appreciate the elegance of your solution, I'd prefer the former for clarity.

[Finbarr]

Of course. Because that's infinitely better than:

  $(el).toggle();

[1123581321]

Toggle was a bit of a pitfall because the developer had to keep track of all the possible states prior to that line. It's easy to drop in as a function when needed in simple scripting (expanding faq sections, etc.)

[frereubu]

IE8 is a bit of a straw man. We've dropped IE entirely when testing unless there's significant (1%+) usage for particular clients, but even the NHS in the UK has dropped IE11.

Edit: https://caniuse.com/?search=classlist.toggle and click Usage Relative.

[fwip]

Plus, the jQuery example also accepts any selector for `el`, including ones that select multiple elements.

The `toggle(el)` function only accepts a single element that you've already selected (e.g: via `document.getElementById("foo")`). You'd need to at least add a call to `querySelectorAll(...).foreach(toggle)`, if you wanted to preserve that piece functionality (which you admittedly don't always want).

[tipiirai]

It's the jQuery API design. I often find myself creating functions like this one:

export function $(query, root=document) { ... }

jQuery acted as a role model for standard web committees. The argument for querySelector / querySelectorAll calls is literally mimicked from John Resig's groundbreaking API design.

[admaiora]

Yesterday I was checking HN from 10years±2weeks ago and guess what the top posts were... "Why you need jQuery" and "You might not need jQuery". I'm too young to know about those days but I guess not much has changed in relation to people's attitude towards jQuery.

[krapp]

What's changed is the billion dollar tech industry invested in convincing people that JQuery is a dead and obsolete technology.

For some reason, JQuery is the exception to the general rule of seeing a mature, battle-tested library as a sign of quality.

[Macha]

The problem jQuery was solving was to provide a usable abstraction over an inconsistent platform for core functionality like event handling and DOM manipulation.

The point of the last decade and a half of standards work was to eliminate that problem, and it has at least moved it from "core web functionality" to more complicated areas like bluetooth, 3d rendering and audio, which jQuery's goals do not include handling.

Is it urgent to remove jQuery from projects? Not really. And it's good the jQuery team maintain the project for that reason. Certainly some projects have gotten performance gains out of removing it, but part of the work they've done in 3.x and now 4.x is arguably jQuery removing stuff internally and replacing them with the now reliable browser APIs.

But on the other hand, is there a great argument for including jQuery in new projects? This is also a "not really".

[marcosdumay]

That site message is "don't import all of jquery just to use the $ global and one or two specific functions".

It's a very fine message and the site contents spread it quite well. But if you actually want to use jquery instead of just some function you got from a reference, by all means, use it, it's a very nice library.

[jampekka]

Much of the billions are used to make JavaScript worse. E.g. ESM is a byzantine mess compared to CJS, and the ceremony and bondage of TypeScript is dramatically increasing busywork.

[LamaOfRuin]

>For almost every task it describes, the jQuery code is shorter, cleaner, and more intuitive than the vanilla "modern" JS one.

Just like leftpad.

[ipaddr]

Instead of needing to import leftpad you have the missing standard js lib

[krapp]

It isn't missing. Javascript was created to serve a specific purpose, which didn't include left-padding text in a terminal. Most language I'm aware of wouldn't have that in their standard lib.

If you want Javascript to act as a drop-in replacement for C++ or Java or some other general programming language (which Javascript was never intended to be) don't act as if needing to write libraries to cover that missing functionality is a problem with the language. You're using the wrong tool for the wrong job.

[midasuni]

Yesterday I wrote a custom page which dumped out a table for some investigation. I threw jquery and a tablesorter plug-in. Without JS you get the table, but with you can easily sort and filter. Took about 2 minutes to add the optional filter. The backend is bash of course.

[sireat]

For tables my favorite jQuery plug-in is: https://datatables.net/

Have a page with some tables? A few lines of jQuery and you have search sorting etc. It can be customized but defaults are fine.

This is how abstractions and progressive enhancement should be done.

[midasuni]

I’m not even sure what I used, it’s the same 5 lines I’ve used for years. Boom bang and on to the next problem.

For every unicorn saas webapp $300k a year developers are writing there’s a thousand small pages. If you’re building a house you aren’t going to use a Swiss Army knife, but if you’re camping out for a couple of days you aren’t going to take a van full of power tools.

[anakaine]

A couple.of well selected power tools are certainly helpful, however. A battery blower to start the fire, a small electric chainsaw for any wood cutting depending on the area and what you take in, and a portable fan if you're in a hot climate. Sometimes a couple of selected power tools are very helpful.

[mobilemidget]

I personally prefer https://sortablejs.github.io/Sortable/ over datatables.net

Though both do what I typically need them to do, customising datatables.net takes me a bit more time though

[GrumpyNl]

Big plus is, it also gives yo the option to export the tables to pdf and other file formats.

[nextaccountic]

About optional JS: you can have that with server-side rendering plus a modern framework (like next.js or leptos). That's certainly not as simple as vanilla html and js, but totally doable.

[kkarpkkarp]

> you can have that with server-side rendering plus

yes, we use PHP for this which is much simpler to grasp than JS-SSR

[geek_at]

plus you don't need to restart any services or rebuild servers. Just git pull and you have the new code on the live server without even a second of downtime

[flemhans]

watch -n 1 git pull

[vmfunction]

In node there is EJS which is basically PHP templating with JS.

[wouldbecouldbe]

Nah, not simpler, nextjs is simpler then php to start working with. Also running & deploying nowadays is easier. PHP used to be easiest, but fell behind.

[pzmarzly]

This very much depends on what you are building and how experienced you are.

If you just want a few pages, no need for background workers or database migrations, PHP is still the king. You download one of many single-executable LAMP servers, and start writing your index.php. Deploy? Just copy files to server. Zero downtime deploy? Copy files to server and use symlink to atomically switch versions. Dependencies? Composer (package manager) is a single-file script, you can place it wherever. Pain only begins when you want to break away from file-based routing, or need custom .htaccess and nginx.conf, or want to isolate components, or need Redis and cron for background jobs.

On NextJS side, I knew a few people who wanted to start their career with it and the experience wasn't smooth. You install nodejs... but your distribution only ships Node 12, so everything is failing with cryptic errors. You search how to upgrade Node, and get caught in nvm vs n vs asdf flamewars. Once you found a working solution (which probably required you to edit env variables), you run the npm command... and it wants root access? To install packages system-wide? So you google around, find a way to make it use the user home directory. Then you are up and running, you aren't sure what this "React" thing is, but you get stuff done. Time to deploy - and you are told to either learn Docker (and Kubernetes if you want zero downtime), or to use one of few hosting companies with a price markup. Well, at least there is a free tier (for now), so most people choose the latter. Was this a simple start?

Now, when it comes to big apps, I'd very much rather use Nextjs than PHP, it is production-tested, gives you a lot "for free", JS LSP is built-in to VSCode, I already know React and most of JS ecosystem. But if somebody tells me that they just finished learning HTML and vanilla JS, and they want to do something simple server-side, I'm torn on what to recommend nowadays.

[tipiirai]

You sure can, but it then comes to the separation of concerns. CSS-in-JS (coupling of concerns) is the preferred option.

[teaearlgraycold]

Having CSS in a separate file feels like defining the predicates for your if statements in a separate file. With tailwind we're getting pretty close to a great solution here.

[postepowanieadm]

Even better - you may use service workers as your 'server-side'.

[PrimeMcFly]

> JavaScript is a must, not optional.

I build plenty of CSS only sites without any JS just fine. I avoid using it as much as I can and generally only need it for forms or galleries, occasionally some ajax stuff.

But it's seldom required.

[manuelmoreale]

Just want to say I appreciate you for doing that.

[PrimeMcFly]

Thanks :)

It just seems like good practice. I want my sites to be as fast, minimal, compatible and as usable as possible, while still looking and feeling modern.

[manuelmoreale]

I hear you. My site is 1 http request and no js so I’m definitely with you on this.

[krick]

I won't dare to predict where industry "is going to move", since I'm not really a frontend developer, so what do I know anyway (and especially since it seems to switch directions every couple of years, and mostly being pulled in all directions simultaneously). But personally I still prefer to use stand-alone JS-scripts and libs included directly into the page, if I can. Mostly because I hate having to deal with complicated (and, importantly, rather slow) build process just for the sake of a couple of web-pages, when the real stuff is some totally invisible backend processing or maybe some sort of HTTP API to be used by other services.

Also, honestly, I really just don't know what's the "correct" way to do things in 2024 on frontend, and I don't know where to even look for a guide, if I don't really want to spend next 6 months entirely in the pursuit of attaining "real" frontend-dev proficiency, but ultimately just to make working stuff, even if it doesn't quite follow the v2024 web-etiquette.

[palmfacehn]

"Etiquette" implies there is some civilizing force. A system that allows us to coexist in peaceful, accessible sanity.

Someone said of a profitable app/site I created with vanilla JS, "But this is looks like it is just a Bootstrap site"

At this point, functionality be damned, customers expect a loading spinner. The norm is something that doesn't load on the first request. Sites don't paint the screen until 10 seconds later, because they are avoiding repaints. Maybe 10-20mb of JS is included in the typical app in this niche. Many totally fail on Firefox. Ambiguous user facing errors on a black screen, "An application client side error occurred" are par for the course.

[khasan222]

I’ve been writing JavaScript for 15 years professionally, and I must say this comment seems to be made by someone not as familiar with the context here. Moving away from React and frameworks like it would require a radical rethinking of what we expect to do with web apps. Building something like google maps, google docs, figma, are definitely doable with some of these tools, but it is almost impossible to maintain. This comment truly ignore the context of why frameworks like react took off. Jquery is great if you need a slideshow on a page, and maybe just some tracking, and even then, I’ve recently opted to just use vanilla js, with things like webpack build targeting whatever versions I would need. JavaScript programming is complex because making great ux can be a non trivial task.

Please excuse any typos, written on the phone

[heartbreak]

How many React apps actually have an interface approaching the complexity of Figma or even Facebook?

No one is arguing that complex web applications don’t benefit from React and friends. It’s completely overkill for most of the web.

[anthonypasq]

why does everyone have this impression that people are using react to render a website that is 5 divs and some images, like where is this perception coming from? do you have any examples at all?

any website that has any sort of meaningful functionality and communication with a server is mostly likely using some sort of framework.

[docmars]

Agreed. There is a _lot_ of naivety around how these frameworks are perceived, from people who have never used them, or who come from different programming backgrounds (i.e. not frontend). It's amusing.

[hombre_fatal]

Yeah, there's this whole meme on HN where React competes with hand-writing the HTML of your three-page brochure website, a website virtually nobody is building.

[lizardking]

A lot of marketing agency development is this sort of brochureware, and to your point they usually aren't using react.

[silent_cal]

These crazy libraries might make sense to you because you've been a JS dev for 15 years. JS is supposed to be a basic building block of the web. React places a learning curve in front of the everyday developer that is effectively impossible. It's fine if it's helpful in edge cases, but it shouldn't be the norm. Basic technology should be accessible.

[erhaetherth]

If you don't want to use a big framework, then you needn't use any library at all. Nearly everything in jQuery is 1 line of modern JS, no?

[masklinn]

> Nearly everything in jQuery is 1 line of modern JS, no?

Since JavaScript never actually requires line breaks, yes.

Otherwise, absolutely not. Modern web APIs remain highly statements-based, with little affordance for pipelining / cascading.

[pier25]

One line of jQuery can replace many lines of vanilla js.

[troupo]

Nearly everything in jQuery is more concise, consistent and composable compared to modern JS APIs. As this site clearly shows: https://youmightnotneedjquery.com/

[colordrops]

Yes, there isn't much reason to use jQuery these days other than keeping with the idioms of a legacy system.

[rdedev]

I'm not a web developer but sometimes I have to make a page with some JS functionality. jQuery saves me a lot of time in such cases

[lucsky]

No, the "industry" is not going to move away from React (or Vue or Solid or Svelte), but idiots on HackerNews (and Reddit and Twitter and Mastodon, etc) might finally stop conflating web SITES and web APPS. One can dream.

[cphoover]

Agreed...Another gripe... the amount of people on HN complaining that a web-app doesn't 'work without JS, when the number of user's who disable JS inside their browser is well under 1%. HN users don't even consider they are not in anyway typical web users.

[spillguard]

From the guidelines:

"Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes."

[lucsky]

You're right, this was 100% sent out of frustration and I probably shouldn't have. I still think that the level of nonsense in this comment section is of galactic proportion though.

[webworker]

I keep saying this. At some point, some very smart people are going to figure out how expensive React is to build and maintain, and it’s going to change the conversation.

[patrickaljord]

jQuery is amazing, still remember the joy of using it 20 years ago. That being said, React, Vue and similar are just better IMO to build and maintain complex apps. Don't get me wrong, jQuery was the best thing at its time and I will always be grateful to its contributors, but today there are better alternatives. I think htmx is nice but not seeing it taking over other frameworks.

[linkjuice4all]

Definitely agree that the modern frameworks are better for complex stuff. Ideally there’s not really a middle ground - you’re either doing complex interactive “app-like” stuff with a framework or adding modest dynamic features to otherwise static content (e.g. static export of WordPress with some jQuery for your forms).

[throwaway2990]

lol react. Never seen a good react project. They all end up a mess.

[holoduke]

You still need some kind of application framework. Jquery is just a low level utility. But higher level you need to maintain architecture. Specially in spa's

[hnfong]

You don't "need" an application framework.

People have been building websites (even SPAs) before the 2010s and they didn't "need" these frameworks.

Given what we know today, I'll grant you that in some cases people would want to use a framework, but it's hardly a necessity unless the context provides more specific requirements.

[bdhcuidbebe]

You dont ”need” anything. But most people prefer some organization, familiarity and reusability, and not having to reinvent the wheel in every project they start.

[holoduke]

Its can be convenient to have some kind of reusable conponents. Like listviews wtih certain functionality. Same for routing. Caching etc.

[claytongulick]

Native web components / custom elements work great for this.

[holoduke]

So you end up with an component framework.

[agos]

you don't "need" a framework for backend development, too, but most people find it highly convenient

[docmars]

Organizing a large jQuery project is absolute hell though. I'll take modern frameworks like Vue any day. The ease of shipping a full-fledged app that feels easy to create and maintain began with Vue (and Svelte).

React tries to achieve the same result, but if you don't use it perfectly right, you're in for hours and hours of headaches and non-solutions.

[dagss]

Unpoly too (very similar to htmx but the small difference makes it a lot more convenient I feel, I wonder why Unpoly isn't getting as much traction as htmx)

[falsandtru]

jQuery remains the best JSONP library. It can get data even when other libraries are blocked.

[rolisz]

If I understand this announcement correctly, they removed support for JSONP

[falsandtru]

Just removed "Automatic" JSONP "promotion". JSONP is still available.

[pjmlp]

Fully agree, jQuery + Bootstrap + standard Web + SSR, and we're gold.

[silent_cal]

I read that the JS fetch API makes jQuery obsolete, is that not true?

[esaym]

>But jQuery doing dynamic binding to dynamically generated forms

Do you have an example of that?

[DonHopkins]

Hold my beer!

https://alive22-dev.turnaroundhealth.com/static/javascript/q...

[ourmandave]

More that one line, doesn't count! =D

[DonHopkins]

It's one line when minimized! ;)

[yashg]

Yup, jQuery is indeed awesome!

[bufferoverflow]

jQuery is not awesome.

It was awesome 15 years ago. Now it's completely outdated. It's very hard to reason about DOM that can be manually changed by any random piece of code. That's why declarative solutions like React/Vue/Svelte are so much better.

[rjbwork]

>It's very hard to reason about DOM

I don't mean to be overly snarky here, but as someone who's just totally out of their depth in modern web UI - is that why people like these frameworks? Because they're very easy to reason about? I've generally found them to be mountains and mountains of boilerplate and spaghetti, but I really do not have a wide base of experience to pull from on this topic.

[Capricorn2481]

I started with Jquery, I learned React. I prefer React.

React complexity is often conflated with things like Next JS or other SPA solutions. React was originally meant to be a library for building small components that you drop into an otherwise static websites. But people usually don't talk about React unless they're talking about whole sites being in React. For that reason, I think its complexity is exaggerated.

More importantly, what the commenter is referring to is the fact that you are encouraged to write Jquery code that can break if you decide to move a div or change a class name. The workflow of CSS selectors is fine for small apps, but can lead to hard to track bugs down the road. It can be avoided if you make a lot of unique IDs. But otherwise you're screwed. There's no scoping. You technically have to read every piece of Jquery code before changing any other code, html, or css, because you could break half the site depending on what people were depending on. There's no IDE support telling you what is selecting what. Events are not colocated on the things they attach to, they could be anywhere.

I can update a React component and be sure that the only places it affects are the places its rendered. And I can get type checking on every input going into a component. That's just way better to me.

I still use JQuery at work, but I usually dread it. And people say JQuery is "smaller" but I would still prefer something like Svelte to Jquery if that's a concern.

I can take or leave Vue, I don't really notice a huge difference between it and other component frameworks.

[treflop]

I’m a big fan of React and jQuery but it sounds like you’re not using jQuery right.

All my jQuery components were self contained and you just initialized them with $(‘[data-date-picker]’).datePicker(). It is pretty obvious to anyone looking at the code that if you remove “data-date-picker”, it stopped being a date picker.

[erhaetherth]

Then you have dumb stuff like if you check a box and want some additional form fields, you have to inject a div or input into the DOM manually, and then make sure you initialize your datepicker, but maybe there will be a flash of unpickerified input if you don't do it right.

[Capricorn2481]

That is true, but this is built-in to React and it's optional for JQuery. I am working on legacy projects a lot and nobody ever writes JQuery like this outside of famous libraries.

[rolisz]

React was developed by Facebook. I don't think they did it for small components on otherwise static sites.

[Capricorn2481]

Facebook was a fairly static site back then, but small is a relative term here. I don't mean to say it was only meant to do that. Just that the origins of React are a far cry from the complexity of SPA frameworks like Next JS. And it can still be used as quite a simple drop in component system. Nothing is stopping you from doing that. Which is why people often say React is not a framework but a library, because it's true.

https://legacy.reactjs.org/blog/2013/06/05/why-react.html

[Zardoz84]

what I usually did, was using data-xxx attributes (and document these attributes and how works) to inject special functionality to html elements. I did this with jQuery, and now I do with vainilla JavaScript.

[christophilus]

That's one of the reasons I like them, yes. I've done a lot of manual DOM manipulation, and a lot of jQuery. When you're building anything complex, it starts to become quite difficult to figure out why a particular piece of the DOM is behaving the way it is. It could be an overly aggressive selector that accidentally targeted it, or any number of things.

Prior to React (and similar libraries), DOM manipulation was generally done in a mutating, effectful way. With React (and similar), if a thing is behaving strangely, I just need to go to the component that rendered said thing, and I can almost always find the problem.

[kccqzy]

Yes React is easy to reason about. In fact old versions of React were even easier to reason about than modern versions using hooks (`useState`). I used to use React and just React: no random npm packages, no Babel or any transpilation, no JSX, and it was pure joy compared to jQuery in a complex multi-step form. The jQuery code was in fact spaghetti.

[jmondi]

For your blog, jquery is totally fine and reasonable. Jquery for a web application? That is going to be way more of a headache. It all depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.

[marcosdumay]

I guess the "easy to reason about" thing people keep saying is meant to tell you that the modern frameworks allow modularization.

Personally, I do find their style of modularization abhorrent. As you said, it's full of boilerplate, it's also full of dependencies, and the worst sin in a software architecture: they don't enable you to specify a simple interface between modules. But they do solve the lack of structure you get when all the code talks to each other freely through the DOM.

[docmars]

Creating a brand new Vue app using Vite as your build system (official) takes less than 2 minutes and you can immediately start using Vue by following its documentation and creating a well-organized web application with its friendly patterns and solutions to the most common pro-UX problems you could encounter in a web app.

Give it a shot, it's stupid-easy, and that's not downplaying anything either.

[rjbwork]

This is pretty funny because the front end team at my company decided last year to migrate from Vue to React because Vue is too complicated and it's hard to find people who know it vs React. Impossible for me to get a read on this stuff. Such a clusterfuck of an ecosystem.

[docmars]

Yea there's certainly a lot of mixed opinions and learning curves involved to be sure. On the one hand, I love how many options there are to build web applications, but on the other, it really does feel fragmented and hiring front-end engineers is a huge gamble with all the different preferences involved because there is no true concept of "standards" everyone follows.

Thankfully it's pretty easy to align a team with a little time and learning what everyone wants.

[scotty79]

You can make spaghetti with everything. But without framework spaghetti is even worse. People who make a mess out react do it because they try to use it as if it is jquery.

[genocidicbunny]

> It's very hard to reason about DOM that can be manually changed by any random piece of code.

I think the parents point is that many websites don't need to change all that much DOM manually, automatically, or in any fashion. And I would agree with them, that for when the only 'dynamic' part of your site is one or two simple forms, and maybe a little carousel of images, jQuery may be perfectly awesome.

[williamcotton]

That is not why React became popular. We have to go back to the end of the server-side ORM era. ERB templates creating an LI element in a certain manner and jQuery creating the same element. So have fun keeping those DOM elements in sync! This and the ever expanding DOM APIs led to single page applications where all of the markup was generated by the client. Cue, oh fuck this is slow and oh fuck, page loads and SEO suffers, so then we see the emergence of virtual DOMs along with server-side Javascript, and we are now generating the same DOM elements with the same code on the front and back. Then everyone realized we are making these complex applications with an untyped language with lots of warts… Flow and Typescript emerge.

Guess what? Spooky action at a distance continues with reducers, custom hooks, custom injected contexts, etc, etc.

[labster]

Different use cases. A lot of the web only has only one or two interactive elements in a scope. The DOM being changed by any random piece of code is not a problem when all of the JavaScript fits on two screens. In fact, it’s a benefit here.

[drschwabe]

It's good for quick things and prototyping cause you can always swap out those calls with native later. It's API is generally easier to remember/less typing that most native equivalents. You can also use its API serverside via Cheerio to do parsing & manipulation of html without a dom.

edit: also its way more lightweight than React/Vue/Svelte i don't necessarily disagree you shouldn't reach for jQuery if you have a dynamic page (something like uhtml+preact signals would be good if you have fair bit of rendering logic going on) but I would say you should totally try seeing how far you can get with jQuery instead of Svelte/React/Vue on simple pages.

[zztop44]

Is it really way more lightweight than Svelte? Svelte has more tooling (of course) but it ships no runtime and only sends the user the JS they actually need to interact with your page.

[drschwabe]

Well, if you're talking SvelteKit then it requires a build step so yes, jQuery is way more lightweight.

jQuery is also pure JS whereas Svelte is Typescript so it may be more difficult to debug/hack if your primarily JS coder.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

I learnt jQuery and I would say ‘I could code in jquery, but not pure JavaScript’ - that’s since changed but I do still find foreach jQuery iteration by classname fairly elegant, in addition to $.get and $.post.

I’m not saying that it’s good or bad, but maintenance may mean developers who don’t know or care for modern web don’t have to learn something new.

[Klonoar]

No, if you actually make modules with jQuery where it’s creating it’s own DOM tree, it’s no different from what React & Co are doing.

Reasoning about the DOM structure has almost never been an issue in my almost 20 years of professionally doing this junk. The complexity has always been elsewhere.

[alternatex]

And you're arguing the complexity that has to be somewhere should go in your custom built jQuery modules instead of components built with a well-known framework?

I spent years maintaining front-end code built by devs who believe their way of doing things was better than what's popular in the industry and I disagree about jQuery entirely.

jQuery is a low level tool and always ends up biting people as the project grows.

[Klonoar]

> And you're arguing the complexity that has to be somewhere should go in your custom built jQuery modules instead of components built with a well-known framework?

jQuery + the DOM are well known frameworks. ;P

[thr0waway001]

I don't care what anyone says, jQuery still rocks and is so damn important and influential. You remove jQuery from every piece of software a good chunk of the all the websites stop working all around the Internet.

[TheMajor]

Yup, hard truths: vanilla JS is far less readable and clunkier than just using jQuery to do the same thing. Also, not everyone needs or wants to move to a shadow DOM framework with a zillion components and high complexity. If you're building a SPA or PWA, yes, absolutely, but for the vast majority of us who use a traditional backend/CMS-driven site with server-side rendering where client-side interactivity is needed, jQuery still does the job really nicely.

[KTibow]

Now I might not know what I'm missing out on since I haven't worked in any projects w/ jQuery as I haven't been developing websites for a long time (and the type of sites I make probably also influences the stack), but there's probably something that does what you want as elegantly without jQuery.

We have stuff like querySelector and toggle in vanilla JS that makes it possible to change state simply, async stuff is much easier to understand than callbacks, and there are ways to split your code into components without using shadow or virtual DOM (see: raw web components, shadowdomless Lit, Svelte, etc). I've never found myself longing for something like jQuery.

[skydhash]

If you're creating a fully interactive webapp (google maps, docs, or apple music), go with one of the frontend frameworks because they will give you a much simpler way of managing states and binding it to the view layer. But the majority of websites are not apps or shouldn't be. You'd only have a couple of interactive elements if you strip the UX to its core. And that can be done easily with server rendered templates and a bit of jquery/vanilla js.

[globular-toast]

I'm not saying jQuery isn't great, but being entrenched and being great are two different things. It's not really saying anything to say things would break if you remove it.

The thing is for a certain time, jQuery was almost seen as inseparable from JS itself. Like the Python standard library is to Python. You can still find StackOverflow questions today asking to do something in JS and the answer is jQuery, and not just "here's how to do it in jQuery", just "here's what you asked for". That means it certainly got used in a lot of places where it wasn't really necessary.

The backlash against it, though, is just your typical pendulum swing that seems so much an unfortunate part of human nature. It's like when CSS was in and table-based layouts were out. I saw developers trying to use CSS to render tables. Nuance is hard and people can't help going to extremes. jQuery is probably still a really useful tool. I've seen some jQuery expressions that are far more elegant and beautiful then a plain JS equivalent. Whether this matters for any particular project is completely up to you. I don't like the way it encourages tons of ad hoc JS snippets all over the place, but that's a fault of developers, not jQuery.

[profmonocle]

It's not just WordPress. A company I used to work for has tens of thousands of lines of jQuery code powering their enterprise SAAS product.

A rewrite in a modern JS framework is just not going to happen unless it becomes absolutely necessary. Much of this code is extremely client-specific stuff written over a decade ago. The argument that using a modern framework helps recruiting doesn't work - the company only pays $75-90k for frontend engineers and has very low turnover, most current engineers have been there 5+ years. And most importantly, their current stack works just fine; they have a bunch of long-time clients who are happy.

A good chunk of software engineering happens in "boring" businesses like this in cities with a much lower cost-of-living than the big tech industry hubs like the Bay Area / Seattle / etc.

[sanitycheck]

The other problem with a "rewrite in a modern JS framework" is that when it's finally done it'll only be a few more years until it needs another "rewrite in a modern JS framework". And that's worse, because at least with JQuery it just stays the same whereas with anything in the NPM ecosystem using anything older than, say, 6 months is kind of a nightmare in terms of dependencies and tooling.

Not broke? Don't fix!

[emseetech]

Wordpress devs are the plumbers of the tech industry. It’s not glamorous work but there’s a ton of money in it because so many people need them.

If I ever decide to retire from latest and greatest hype cycle big tech startup world, I’ll go build Wordpress sites for honest coin and wrap up every day by 3pm.

[TheMajor]

The fact that Wordpress runs so much of the web sometimes wakes me in a cold sweat. If you're a dev worth their salt and knows proven engineering and design patterns, then Wordpress code is absolutely terrifying to look through.

[Zetobal]

See comments like yours do that for me. I will see you in the 30 meetings needed for the new form on the contact page.

[junaru]

Comments like yours do that for me. Every day we suspend several WP sites for failing to put basic captcha on their contacts page that results in the form being abused for email bombing.

Maybe on meeting 27 they will put the damn thing on and save themselves the headache of getting out of RBLs.

If theres one thing WP developers cant write its contact forms! :)

P.S. Wordpress is fine in general.

[radium3d]

heh, try 11-12pm. o.O

[noduerme]

I was going to post on HN not long ago and didn't, about how I still can't find a great event chain handling / bubbling model that lets me use both DOM members and abstract class instances to trigger interchangeable events. I've built my own event dispatchers here and there, but jQuery just does everything right. Although event handling is almost the only thing I still use jQuery for, it's so useful that I still include it in almost every client-side project. The reason I was going to post was to ask if anyone knew of a slim library that could both $(window).trigger('click') and $(myClassInstance).trigger('myCustomEvent',{data}) with the same API for listening to either one asynchronously. With the rise of fetch() and css selectors I could probably do without the rest of jQuery at this point. But why reinvent the wheel? And before anyone tells me that having class instances dispatch events is a code smell... it's absolutely necessary if you want to build responsive frameworks from scratch.

[Just for example, my base component class listens for a particular custom resize event dispatched from the screen that contains it, which only dispatches to components on screens that don't scroll and need to reformat their contents. The screen class listens for window.resize but only dispatches if it's in trouble with the layout. Putting individual DOM resize listeners to window on each and every component would be insane.]

[claytongulick]

If your class instances are attached to the DOM somehow, you may be looking for CustomEvents?

    document.querySelector('#something').dispatchEvent(
      new CustomEvent('myCustomEvent', {...options})
    );

and

    document.querySelector('#something-else').addEventListener('myCustomEvent', () => {...});

You don't even need CustomEvents if you don't need to carry extra data with the event. You can just do

    new Event('myCustomEvent')

and dispatch it.

For triggering 'click' events and such, you can create and dispatch native events, as described here [1].

More verbose than jquery, like most native DOM APIs, but works well.

If you're not dealing with a DOM element and just need to dispatch/listen from a class, try out EventTarget [2]?

Your class can inherit from EventTarget, and it gets dispatchEvent and addEventListener, just like a DOM element and you can use any of the above things with it:

    class Test extends EventTarget {
    ...
    }

    let foo = new Test();
    foo.dispatchEvent(...);

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Events/Creating...

[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/EventTarget

[noduerme]

Thanks. Frequently though, my class instances are not attached to the DOM ...more often they're purely data classes that receive occasional updates and listen for events from one another. And it's unweildy or impossible to have them all inherit EventTarget as a base class. In any case it's overkill: I just need a fairly simple event loop to track instances, listeners and callbacks (on or off the DOM) and work as a switchboard for events, with the caveat that it's also nice to be able to pipe native events through the same switchboard when applicable.

[thedangler]

I remember switching from mootools to jQuery back in 2006ish. Thought it was fantastic. Awesome it’s still around. We still use it from Time to time.

[kentf]

Don't forget Prototype (http://prototypejs.org/)

[slater]

and scriptaculous!

http://script.aculo.us/

[quickthrower2]

YUI https://clarle.github.io/yui3/

Do we need to get into underscore etc?

[epalm]

Heh, yeah, I was a heavy Prototype user back when it wasn’t clear which one of jQuery, Prototype, Scriptaculous, dojo, or mootools would ‘win’.

[andrew_]

And Dojo! https://dojotoolkit.org/

[jkingsman]

Oh man, back in the day I got my first exposure to big, enterprise web apps in the form of an undergrad internship on a control panel for a major database that ran on Dojo. Every time I could scurry back to Python to work on a backend feature, I breathed a sigh of relief. It put me off frontend for a long time until I arrived at a shop that taught better, and not being taught was definitely a big part of my fear of Dojo/frontend dev, but Dojo is also BIG and you can build some really unwieldy systems with it. You can do that with any framework, sure, but in the heyday of Dojo, it was a lot of opaque logic that wasn't as well doc'd out or understandable just by reading as today.

Dojo put the fear (respectful) and fear (scared) of big, enterprise frontend development in me.

[tambourine_man]

>…WordPress is still more than 1/3 of the web…

Why still? WordPress, like jQuery, is awesome. It's an incredibly powerful and easy open source CMS. I hope it takes more of the Web.

And if you're gonna defend the decentralization of the Web (and I do), it's hard to find a better argument than “just buy a domain and install WordPress”.

[PrimeMcFly]

It's a buggy insecure mess. No one should be advocating for wordpress.

[dawnerd]

The only buggy or insecure code is really from third party plugins and themes. Wordpress core has been rock solid. Ya you still need to setup caching and there’s some modifications to run it at scale but that’s all a solved problem thanks to the likes of Automattic and their VIP platform.

[agos]

how much of that ⅓ of the internet is running third party plugins and themes on their WP installation?

[Macha]

If they hired bespoke custom development from contractors at the price range these WP sites are developed for, do you think that would be better code?

[dawnerd]

How much of the rest of the web are using third party dependencies in their code?

We’ve built sites for a very large social media company where everything had to be audited before production including third party plugins. WP VIP has a list of plugins they’ve vetted and/or applied their own patches to secure.

[PrimeMcFly]

> The only buggy or insecure code is really from third party plugins and themes. Wordpress core has been rock solid.

Rock solid? I don't really trust the codebase at all, and generally you need at least some plugins.

[tambourine_man]

I’d like to know the name of this alternative that’s as feature-rich and yet bullet-proof while still being open source

[rastographics]

it's called processwire and once I found it I never looked back

[PrimeMcFly]

Django and Wagtail is one option. Do a little research and you'll find others.

[vdaea]

Neither are written in PHP so they don't work on most cheap hostings.

[PrimeMcFly]

You can get a kimsufi server for $6/month, and there is plenty of cheap hosting offering django, pretty sure you can even find python hosting for free up until a point.

[collyw]

It depends on who you listen to. Non coders seem to love Wordpress. I worked in a place with a Django booking site and a Wordpress marketing site. The other two devs knew PHP, while I know python, they advised me not to learn it and to stay away.

[seydor]

nature abhors a vacuum

[irjustin]

jQuery will always hold a special place in my heart. It made absolutely terrible APIs usable and help abstract away a lot of the different browser issues.

While I do a lot of effort to stay off jQuery these days, every time I have a library that ends up using jQuery its always intuitive to use.

[kamaal]

And many many company internal tools, that won't be rewritten and just get replaced with something better(ReactJS?) over time.

It would be around for long is nice, but you can't make a career using it these days.

jquery, perl just some of those insanely useful tools which get the work done, but they don't pay you well these days.

[mouzogu]

> Any advances to removing deprecated APIs or functions are great.

if something is used, it has value. it's not deprecated.

[quickthrower2]

The fact that it, well, works doesn’t help with the React world domination either.

[krick]

Honestly, though, given more sophisticated browser-native selectors were implemented way after jQuery was, I wonder why didn't they just make at least somewhat jQuery-compatible API. It's just way simpler.

[seydor]

A lot of us are using it actively. It's so lightweight now that it s free, and it s somewhat better than vanilla js.

[lostemptations5]

jQuery is just way cooler than the comparatively build in (and sometimes obtuse) web standard replacements for it.

[Onavo]

They just need to add JSX support. Half the reason people use react is because of JSX.

[IgorPartola]

Maybe unpopular opinion but JSX is inferior to something like the Vue templating system. I much prefer to have HTML with some JS sprinkled in than JS that looks like HTML but isn’t.

[Klathmon]

And to wage this holy war a little, I personally much prefer JSX over a templating system that looks like html attributes but acts different, while trying to act like javascript but can't.

Honestly at the end of the day they both get the job done, but for me personally working in JSX is just so easy to pickup and use, and while it's not perfect, I do prefer it over having to learn yet another library specific templating kinda-sorta language.

[TheMajor]

Most of us devs had "separation of concerns is critical" drilled into us for many, many years. For that reason alone, JSX just gives me the baddest of smells when I look at it.

[mardifoufs]

How does jsx not have separation of concerns? I get what you are referring to but that's not SoC as I know it

[troupo]

This way of looking at separation of concerns helps: https://x.com/simonswiss/status/1664736786671869952

[troupo]

> I much prefer to have HTML with some JS sprinkled

That's not what vue templates are. It's three or four different templating DSLs in one.

v-for alone will show that it's not HTML with Javascript: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28059397

And there's more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19199423

[preommr]

> That's not what vue templates are. It's three or four different templating DSLs in one.

The pattern is very obvious?

If array: (value, index)=>void

If object: (value, key, index)=>void

If it's an array, it's the call signature for the args of the forEach method, i.e. (value, index)=>void, but can be assigned a function that's just (value)=>void if index is unneeded. If it's an object, it's an extension of the same logic with (value, key, index).

It's not 4 dsls in one, anymore than jsx is a 1000 markups in one.

[troupo]

> The pattern is very obvious?

It's not

> It's not 4 dsls in one, anymore than jsx

I "like" that when discussing these things everyone completely ignores everything, and focuses on one specific thing.

So, again. The claim was that Vue templates is "HTML + Javascript"

1. As v-for clearly shows it's not even close to Javascript, as there are no Javascript constructs that correspond to this

2. As everything else, not just v-for shows, it's neither HTML (so many custom attributes with extensions and shorcuts etc.) nor Javascript.

[mock-possum]

And vue templates are in turn inferior to lit-html

[boredtofears]

Fully agreed. I built a mostly vanilla JS app using a bare bones JSX lib[1] a few months ago and was surprised at how little I missed the rest of React.

[1] https://github.com/alex-kinokon/jsx-dom

[rpncreator]

A variant of this was tried over a decade ago, but never made it live - jQuery Templates. Not quite the same…

https://github.com/BorisMoore/jquery-tmpl

[technojunkie]

If "they" is WordPress, have you tried modern PHP? 8.x has come a long way to looking and feeling like a modern programming language. So many new things reminding me of Typescript, Javascript, Python, etc.

[quickthrower2]

Should be easy. It is just a case of presenting the right interface to the generated code. For example Mithril supports it (with some quirks admittedly). But in simple terms it is an adaptor.

[kijin]

I think you can already do that by wiring together something like NakedJSX. You just need a fancy jQuery plugin to make it more ergonomic.

[todotask]

Now we have React, React DOM and jQuery in WordPress.

[mardifoufs]

1/3 of the web does not mean much. Are you referring to web usage or just the number of web pages?

[seydor]

web pages and it does matter a lot. Among others, Woocommerce runs 23.43% of e-commerce.