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JavaScript

Posted by Y B
Y B
14,136 Points

JQuery vs Native JS objects and methods

I've just finished the making an interactive webpage course and previously the JQuery course before that.
jQuery seems a lot simpler (not least because of the universal consistency across browsers).

However I have a question on the structure of methods used in JQuery vs the Native JS web API.

All the methods in JQuery seem to be on the JQuery object i.e. $('someSelector').method().

However in JS the methods seem attached to a variety of objects and are not valid for all of them. e.g. document, element, Node, ParentNode etc.... So in order to make notes on what the method will do I really need to reference the object too.

ie document.getElementbyID vs Element.getElementbyID (probably not the best example as it uses ID but hopefully you get what I mean).

Is my understanding correct do the methods in JS depend on the object where in JQuery they use a more universal format?

1 Answer

Andrew Shook
Andrew Shook
31,709 Points
Andrew Shook
Andrew Shook
31,709 Points

Yes and no. The methods in jQuery work exactly the same as the methods in vanilla JS. However, all the methods in jQuery are attached/used on the jQuery object, which is just a JS object. You are trying to compare jQuery to all of JS when a better analogy would be to compare jQ to JS's document object. Just like the document object, jQuery has certain methods that will work only on itself. The only difference between the two is that the document object is a specific object (i.e. it works only on document), while jQuery is a general purpose library/object that is designed to make work with the DOM via JS easier and smooth out some of the rough spots in JS.

Y B
Y B
14,136 Points

Thanks I suppose I was trying to compare JQuery to the web API part of JS.