Hacker News Reader

Comment by inglor | Hacker News Reader

You are arguing against a strawman - no one is claiming otherwise. All paul_irish wanted to show is that people often use jQuery without realizing that most of what they do is also possible with the current browser APIs. jQuery does a ton more (animation, ajax etc) - the point was not to "rewrite jQuery in 10 lines" (that's Zepto)

View on HN

Zepto is more of a "provide the jquery interface you're used to" (and that people often find easier, probably by habit) for modern browsers without all the added compatibility in jquery. I don't like the way they present themselves (or at least did in the early days) but I believe they have a place.

I tried "Flot" charts library with zepto as a smaller replacement for JQuery, but it was incompatible with JQuery and uses a weird code style that is incompatible/slow with Firefox (and Zepto devs refuse to fix their code). In the end I replaced the few Jquery dependencies in Flot by hand. It's a shame that Flot still requires Jquery, it's a good charts library.

The primary problem is that the zepto.Z function overrides dom.__proto__, which prevents many JIT optimizations. Overriding an object's __proto__ property is strongly discouraged and will be deprecated in ES6 --Firefox bug 947048

Um, isn't the point of Zepto a modular jQuery that may not support 100% of what jQuery does but it tries to at about the same speed (or better)?

I think modern jQuery is already modular (or semi-modular) and you can download a build of it that contains the features you want.

But honestly, if you load jQuery from a big-time CDN, chances are your users already have it cached and don't need to load anything.

The subtitle of the article is "Because you want the $ of jQuery without the jQuery". With such an ambiguous statement, I think we can afford ceronman the benefit of the doubt.

Furthermore, I don't think he's making up a strawman at all now matter how you look at it. He agreed with the article. You CAN re-implement jQuery in 10 lines of code if all you want is 0.1% the functionality of jQuery. That's what the article said and it is true. It's not an argument against any perceived strawman.

The next paragraph was praise for jQuery and the final paragraph said it's fine to not use jQuery and added an opinion about what "these kinds of posts seem like". Where's the strawman?

> The subtitle of the article is "Because you want the $ of jQuery without the jQuery". With such an ambiguous statement, I think we can afford ceronman the benefit of the doubt.

Headlines are supposed to be ambiguous, in the sense that they are much shorter than the content they accompany (and thus there are fewer possible headlines than there are possible articles). You're expected to read the content.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com