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JavaScript

Zoe Xiao
Zoe Xiao
7,195 Points
Posted by Zoe Xiao
Zoe Xiao
7,195 Points

Does jQuery make DOM scripting useless?

I am reading the book DOM scripting and I wonder if DOM scripting like getElementByTagName is outdated as jQuery provides a simpler way to get any element in the web page?

1 Answer

Nemanja Pribilovic
Nemanja Pribilovic
5,366 Points
Nemanja Pribilovic
Nemanja Pribilovic
5,366 Points

Pure Javascript to access the DOM can be faster as you can cut the overhead that jQuery has on this. However it doesn't always have to be faster as you could write some major mistakes that slow things down again. jQuery on the other hand has been battle tested over the past few years and is proven to be performant.

Another thing is, jQuery wasn't specifically designed with mobile devices in mind. Events like click cause a delay due to this fact (~300ms). jQuerys animations are also quite slow on the average mobile device because the way they are written makes them CPU bound, an average mobile device doesn't have a lot of CPU power. A way around this is by using hardware accelerated CSS animations.