I'm consistently surprised by the commenters on HN who seem to think jQuery is just a DOM selection library, when in fact it is a widely supported, incredibly stable tool set for (yes) DOM selection, but also attribute manipulation, Ajax requests, event handling, animation, and general utility functions. What's more, where there _is_ native functionality that replaces jQuery, the API is never as fluent.
For work that needs a little enhancement on top of server-side HTML, but not a full-blown JS UI framework, jQuery is a small price to pay for a stable, reliable, and cross-browser compatible dependency.
For work that needs a little enhancement on top of server-side HTML, but not a full-blown JS UI framework, jQuery is a small price to pay for a stable, reliable, and cross-browser compatible dependency.