I'm a Systems Reliability and DevOps engineer for Netdata Inc. When not working, I enjoy studying linguistics and history, playing video games, and cooking all kinds of international cuisine.
In the old days, before Chrome and Firefox, when Internet Explorer wasn’t even a decade old, Netscape Navigator was still a major part of the browser market share, and ECMAScript 3 was the core basis for JavaScript, the DOM APIs were very different. Those differences mostly involved requiring you to manually traverse the DOM to find groups of elements that matched specific criteria. Essentially, you had to implement document.querySelector() and the various related functions yourself, and event handling was rather more complicated (and less consistent).
Because of how crappy the DOM APIs were early on, one of the big things at the time was to write libraries to make them better (as is normal for programmers to do). jQuery was one of the most successful such libraries (Prototype is another early example that held on for a long time), providing both an easy way to select elements or groups of elements using CSS selectors (this functionality was earth-shattering when it was first implemented, though I do not recall if jQuery was where it first came into being) and much nicer event handling, as well as some nice utility functions for things like JS-powered animations or AJAX networking functionality.
Over time, a significant percentage of the functionality in jQuery has either been added to the DOM APIs (most significantly including the element selection functionality and much, but not all, of the event handling improvements) or implemented in other ways in the usual web tool stack (for example, many of the basic parts of the animations are now in CSS). However, jQuery has hung on due to the huge amount of other things that depend on jQuery (for example, Bootstrap only got rid of their dependency on jQuery with Bootstrap 5 a few months ago).
In the old days, before Chrome and Firefox, when Internet Explorer wasn’t even a decade old, Netscape Navigator was still a major part of the browser market share, and ECMAScript 3 was the core basis for JavaScript, the DOM APIs were very different. Those differences mostly involved requiring you to manually traverse the DOM to find groups of elements that matched specific criteria. Essentially, you had to implement
document.querySelector()and the various related functions yourself, and event handling was rather more complicated (and less consistent).Because of how crappy the DOM APIs were early on, one of the big things at the time was to write libraries to make them better (as is normal for programmers to do). jQuery was one of the most successful such libraries (Prototype is another early example that held on for a long time), providing both an easy way to select elements or groups of elements using CSS selectors (this functionality was earth-shattering when it was first implemented, though I do not recall if jQuery was where it first came into being) and much nicer event handling, as well as some nice utility functions for things like JS-powered animations or AJAX networking functionality.
Over time, a significant percentage of the functionality in jQuery has either been added to the DOM APIs (most significantly including the element selection functionality and much, but not all, of the event handling improvements) or implemented in other ways in the usual web tool stack (for example, many of the basic parts of the animations are now in CSS). However, jQuery has hung on due to the huge amount of other things that depend on jQuery (for example, Bootstrap only got rid of their dependency on jQuery with Bootstrap 5 a few months ago).
Thank's for the history & explantaion!