This is not much of a post but a bit of a rant. “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to”, right?

I have a problem with jQuery–not with the framework as such, but with some of its users. And who in their right mind wouldn’t be getting the amp when just about any webdev site, forum and topic is now full of clever know-it-alls that come and declare how ‘such and such jQuery plugin will do what you want’. There’s always a jQuery plugin for everything, didn’t you know…

Does not matter if the question at hand is on vanilla javascript or mootools, just add jQuery and whistle… Already use another framework? Get jQuery anyway, it’s so good you can run in compatibility mode!

The sad part is in how a large portion of these jquerysts have absolutely no understanding of vanilla javascript. It feels as if some of them inadvertently consider ‘javascript’ and ‘jQuery’ to be synonymous…

Aren”t people just getting carried away slightly? I’ll be the first to admit how jQuery is full of awesome features, documentation and support. Why, it’s so great and so far removed from standard javascript syntax that some go to extreme lengths to mimic its shorthand in other frameworks as well. Just the other, having downvoted a jQuery solution for a mootools question on stackoverflow, I was told how $(“someid”).click(); was a perfectly reasonable and valid mootools syntax (as shown by David Walsh)

Paradoxically, in lowering the standards and requirements (in the sense of, by being too accessible and too easy to use), jQuery has spawned an army of coders that don’t even have to learn javascript. A lot of badly formed code gets released, complete with a disregard for best practices, memory, bandwith use, usability and god knows what else…

Still, perhaps there will come a day when mootools sports a high-spirited in-your-face following. For we have a lot to be tooting about, after all…