Well put.
On Jul 11, 5:54 am, Stephan Beal <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> A public jQuery forum is probably not the place to address non-
> Believers - that is, people who do not use jQuery - but my hope is
> that some of the Believers here will take this and pass it on to any
> non-Believers who they know, to help convert the Poor Sods who are
> wasting their time writing code to traverse and manipulate their
> [X]HTML DOMs.
>
> To help put this in context a bit, i want to lay my credentials out on
> the table, so that nobody will think that this letter is coming from a
> noob script-kiddie. My first line of code (in BASIC, no less) was
> pounded out on Christmas day of 1983. Since that day my life has more
> or less been centered around computing. Since 1994 i have worked
> professionally with computers, and since over 10 years i've earned my
> daily bread by programming in a variety of languages, such as Java, C+
> + and PHP. i run a couple of Open Source projects, such
> ashttp://toc.sf.net,http://SpiderApe.sf.net, and, my personal
> favourite,http://s11n.net.
> i also write technical papers from time to time (http://
> wanderinghorse.net/computing/papers/).
>
> So... now that that's out of the way...
>
> When i first caught wind of jQuery, the name made it sound like an SQL
> library for Java. As i have absolutely zero need for such a tool, i
> ignored jQuery. Over the months i came across more and more mentions
> of it on the net, and finally got curious enough to actually take a
> peek.
>
> On the home page of jquery.com we are immediately faced with the
> second arch-enemy of programmers everywhere: a Statement of Hype. It
> speaks thusly:
>
> "You start with 10 lines of jQuery that would have been 20 lines of
> tedious DOM JavaScript. By the time you are done it's down to two or
> three lines and it couldn't get any shorter unless it read your mind."
> - Dave Methvin
>
> Barf! Hype!
>
> (The first arch-enemy of programmers is of course the Marketing
> Department, who are themselves normally responsible for generating
> Hype. But, in fact, we have a symbiotic relationship with Marketing,
> so we should not bemoan them too much.)
>
> Despite the suspicious smell of Marketing, we poke around the site
> nonetheless. If jQuery is mentioned so often on the net, the
> implication is that there actually is something worth looking at.
> (Err... that doesn't always hold true, but that's another story
> altogether. *cough*PHPNuke*cough*) After perusing a few of the online
> examples, jquery seems to be pretty slick. With a download of only
> 21k, it is hard to resist downloading it, so we do.
>
> While it takes a little while to set up a few useful examples, the
> more we use jQuery, the more useful it seems to be. We continually
> return to the web site to browse the tutorials and API documentation.
> After a day or two we are fairly comfortable with it, and All is Good.
>
> Then we decide we need More. Now that jQuery has freed us from the
> Tedium of the DOM, we want our web pages to do More. We want to add
> animation effects, tabbed controls, and whatnot. Those are a lot of
> work to implement, and we have not, so far, done so because it is so
> tedious to do so. We start to write some code to implement them, and
> quickly give up in frustration, as jQuery has spoiled us so completely
> that our stomachs retch violently when we write
> "document.createElement(...)" and "document.getElementById()".
>
> Then we get the idea/hope that perhaps jquery can also help in such a
> job. Despite the fact that "query" has very little to do with such
> features (at least on the surface), we poke around the jQuery plugins
> repository to see what others have done. The size of the repository
> immediately impresses us. (But our enthusiasm is held in check by the
> memory of the great number of plugins written by script kiddies for
> crap software like PHPNuke.)
>
> Wow... not only are these additional features already available as
> plugins, but some of them are available in multiple flavours, so we
> can pick and choose. As we browse the plugins we note a pattern - the
> source code files for the plugins are typically under two kilobytes.
> Yes, 2k. Unheard of - complete, useful code that's under 2k? No way.
>
> Yes, brothers and sisters, it is possible. It is proven and
> demonstrated dozens of times over on jquery.com. But it is only
> possible because the jQuery developers have brought us such a Damned
> Slick framework. The word "framework" sounds suspiciously like
> Something from the Marketing Department, but don't let that deter you
> - simply interpret it as "a collection of pre-defined functionality
> off of which to build more functionality." (But framework" is a lot
> easier to say.)
>
> If you do any significant amount of browser-based JavaScripting (as
> opposed to embedded code, such as using SpiderMonkey or Rhino), take a
> few minutes to look over jQuery. Then take a few hours to get
> comfortable with it. Then weep for all of the hours you've previously
> wasted writing tedious code to traverse and manipulate DOM nodes, and
> know that the days of the Tedium of the DOM are past, and that we can
> now bask in the light of this next step in the evolution of JavaScript
> applications.
>
> http://jquery.com/
>
> We now have a choice to make: 1) weep for those Poor Bastards who do
> not Believe, or 2) help the Poor Bastards who do not Believe. If you
> choose (1), then stop here and weep (or laugh) all you like. If you
> choose (2), pass around the jQuery URL (hint:http://jquery.com) to
> any Poor Bastards you know, point them to the numerious tutorials and
> the API documentation, and then watch gleefully as they sob away their
> pent-up frustrations and shout like madmen, "aaaarrrrgggghhhh! If I
> had only known this two weeks ago, before our project deadline had
> passed!"
>
> Amen, brothers and sisters.
>
> ----- stephan bealhttp://wanderinghorse.net/computing/js/
> 11 July 2007
>
> PS: i am in no way affiliated with jquery.com. In fact, i was, until
> very recently, one of the above-mentioned Poor Bastards.
