Actually the name is deliberate. A homage to jquery, at first I even considered calling this library JCustom. I think the logic is cool, as Hyphen aspires to be a kind of layer atop custom elements, as JQuery was a layer atop the DOM (and MUCH more!).

Yet, the age of JQuery has passed. It's light has gone out of the world, and John Resig has retreated to the West with the Elves.

I don't think it's really an issue.

Also, it's time to consider that passing the torch of '$' is ok. Moreover, perhaps it was never not ok. As in, the existence of a library that binds to a tiny symbol should not restrict others from using the same symbol. Otherwise it would be kind of like 'variable name squatting'--not good! Dollars for all, I say! Who's with me???

So while I get your concern about conflicts there's always been ways to avoid namespace conflicts, such that these avoidance functions have been built into the libraries themselves, in the form of: noConflict().

I think that's sufficient.

And, not that it's the best guide of best practice, but for a long time Chrome, Safar and Firefox have included $, $$ and so on functions in their consoles, as part of the Web Console API.

I get you might be concerned about this, so you can easily modify this tiny base class of Hyphen to call the base whatever you like. Reasonably, there's plenty of names that could be good for a base class, given whatever it is that you might want! :)

For me, tho, I think $ is a beautiful symbol to name it after so I'm sticking with that. JQuery can bind to other symbols, but it's also not as common these days. I'm not worried about it.

Do you think I should be worried about this? If so why?

(I mean, leaving aside the fact that it's utterly nondescriptive...)