The site youmightnotneedjquery.com is making the rounds, with over 3k (soon 4k, I suspect) tweets and ~1.5k stars on GitHub. It’s a fun site codifying something I’ve heard a lot lately — the sort of nervous “ehhhhhhh” reaction to jQuery. These reactions have been around a while, judging from Zepto‘s release in 2010.
The YMNNjQ (that was fun) site compares jQuery implementation to how to do it in vanilla JavaScript, once you’ve set your desired IE support (ah, IE, the bane of the JS developer’s existence … except that was true when we dealt with IE6 & 7 … less so now). All in all, I like the site and find the message clever, but I really liked this Twitter reaction:
So jQuery is as uncool as WordPress now, huh.
— Helen Hou-Sandí (@helenhousandi) January 31, 2014
I feel like that, more than anything else, sums up the YMNNjQ situation. People are taking the website like it’s saying “jQuery is uncool now.” However, the case for jQuery, like WordPress, is that everyone is using it. WordPress isn’t “elite web development,” but it’s extremely popular, used by more than 20% of websites (including this blog). For me, developing with WordPress was a great way to build websites quickly before I started to get more involved in the development process. Another jQuery analogy?
I fall into the camp where I think jQuery is great for getting started in JavaScript — yes, you can do without it from the beginning, but it gets you there so much faster. Once you’ve been around JS for a while (however long that is), you start figuring out how the DOM works, you start looking things up on MDN rather than w3schools, and maybe you start writing more vanilla JavaScript.
I like the discussion the site’s started, and I definitely don’t see jQuery usage going down anytime soon.