Every time I try to build something without jQuery, I regret it.
Not because of selectors, that's (sometimes) easy to do for lots of (basic) selectors. Not because of DOM manipulation, as long as you're willing to sacrifice simplicity and readability, you can build iterative loops to modify a collection of HTML elements.
No, it's the unexpected things that cause me pain. Want to use event handlers on dynamically generated DOM objects? Write your own event bubbling library. Want to create custom events/handlers? Ditto. Promises, .serialize(), .extend(), etc. might all be simple to write your own version, but when you realize you've reimplemented 50% of jQuery to avoid using jQuery, you feel like an idiot. [Source: I do this every 3 years]
Not because of selectors, that's (sometimes) easy to do for lots of (basic) selectors. Not because of DOM manipulation, as long as you're willing to sacrifice simplicity and readability, you can build iterative loops to modify a collection of HTML elements.
No, it's the unexpected things that cause me pain. Want to use event handlers on dynamically generated DOM objects? Write your own event bubbling library. Want to create custom events/handlers? Ditto. Promises, .serialize(), .extend(), etc. might all be simple to write your own version, but when you realize you've reimplemented 50% of jQuery to avoid using jQuery, you feel like an idiot. [Source: I do this every 3 years]
Life is too short to not use jQuery.