jQuery revisited

It's funny, M-W I ran myself a little ragged substitute teaching each night from like 5-10:30.

But Wednesday it was a lesson in jQuery - obviously the curriculum is a little long the tooth (pointing out yes, jQuery is passe but still shows up on like 70-80% of websites) but it was like revisiting an old friend you hadn't seen in ages.

Nowadays browsers are pretty much standardized, and the "fetch" library covers AJAX pretty well - two of the sweet spots jQuery fixed - But to think jQuery was making both easy decades ago! For a long time I was a big fan of https://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ which showed the Vanilla equivalent of most of the important jQuery uses - though the jQuery syntax is generally cleaner. Honestly, jQuery's syntax for animating an item is still much more intuitive than CSS Animations if the situation is imperative and not the result of a screen scroll or what not. (I learned CSS hand-in-hand with jQuery and they were like the perfect complements to take in together)

But try and argue that "hey PHP and jQuery were/are pretty good" and they laugh you out of the room. (Or more realistically, make a mental note that you may be too old and out of it to hire) Ignoring the counter vibe that "oh maybe rendering everything on the client for the last ten years was a mistake" - but server side rendering (in PHP) and dolling things up as needed (in jQuery, or Vanilla JS) is pretty fast and effective AND stable - I have websites that keep running and running with zero maintenance needed, but when it's time to add a feature, that's pretty straight forward as well. (Hell, one of the young punk frameworks is "htmx" - its big trick is stuffing html bits from the server right into the DOM.  Which has been a single command in jQuery

$( "#resultdiv" ).load( "ajax/test.html" );
 

for years and years.)

And of course there's always Pieter Levels sticking to a PHP and JQuery stack for multiple sites that each pull in tends of thousands per month. 

Heh, maybe jQuery needs its own Taking PHP Seriously page for me to link to when I'm feeling defensive - well, no i do stick with Vanilla.js over jQuery - but it's not that much better, except it feels great to not have the dependency.