Thanks for the response, I do admit I haven't really played with jquery in depth, just seen lots of code.
However, it does seem like it is geared to "Find things in the dom" a fair amount. Whilst I can see that being handy for some websites, for webapps I can see less point - I know what's in the DOM, I put it there. If I need to do something with ssl links later, I'll just remember them all.
In your example $('a[href^="https"]') I'd say it'd be a lot tidier and faster where possible to just give all https links a class and manipulate that class - sure, not as easy to do things like your 2nd example, which admittedly is kinda fun (Although seeing HTML in javascript strings always makes me feel very very sick).
Several people seem to sell jquery etc on cross browser issues. But from my personal experience most of those issues are css layout issues - not js issues. Is that sort of thing covered in jquery?
Most UI code written in JS is a variant of "find something in the DOM and change it". Most JS frameworks are really UI frameworks. And in evolutionary terms, we are with JS where X11 was around the time when Xt came out; there's Motif if you want it, but I might just stick with Xt and wait for Gtk.
What are the cross-browser issues you're thinking jQ won't handle for you?
Things like IE scrollbars covering the content, word-wrap weirdness, designMode idiocy.. Differences in how iframes are handled - Things like that. Not to mention all the IE6 rubbish like if you set left and right, it can't figure out width.
"Most UI code written in JS is a variant of "find something in the DOM and change it"."
I'd agree to a point, but I'd note that ideally you want to keep handy js references to what you have in the DOM so you don't have to find it again. And if you put it in the DOM, you don't ever have to find it, you just store it somewhere handy. Constantly performing search operations just isn't efficient.
However, it does seem like it is geared to "Find things in the dom" a fair amount. Whilst I can see that being handy for some websites, for webapps I can see less point - I know what's in the DOM, I put it there. If I need to do something with ssl links later, I'll just remember them all.
In your example $('a[href^="https"]') I'd say it'd be a lot tidier and faster where possible to just give all https links a class and manipulate that class - sure, not as easy to do things like your 2nd example, which admittedly is kinda fun (Although seeing HTML in javascript strings always makes me feel very very sick).
Several people seem to sell jquery etc on cross browser issues. But from my personal experience most of those issues are css layout issues - not js issues. Is that sort of thing covered in jquery?