It’s a pet hate of mine to see the jquery lib imported in it’s entirity to do something an simple and unecessary as selecting a div, or clearing the initial text in an input – small tasks like this really don’t require a library at all. My other hate is where people try to use a plugin for everything, to un needed.

However, you also have to weight up the fact that JQuery and similar is easy to develop in, less time consuming than vanilla JavaScript and is tested across all the major browsers – writing your own solutions using plain JavaScript can cause issues.

Of course libs like JQuery also cut down on the horrible inline JavaScript and has the ‘magic’ doc ready function too :)

I think you’re spot on there. I’ll always use jQuery because of how easy it is to work with. Trying to do everything in “pure” JavaScript can be incredibly tedious!

Nice idea for the expanding textarea I will definitely implement that. Maybe with a plugin!

I started learning jQuery due to the relatively easy learning curve from html/css but since then have started to learn/understand ‘real’ javascript and use a mix of that with jQuery (hand coded for purpose) on various sites.

I think libaries like jQuery (+ plugins) make for a good introduction to javascript and help us on our way but like you say once you get to know them then you can make things happen yourself without the need for plugins and their bloat.

P.S a self expanding ‘textarea’ would be very swanky… sure I saw a plugin for that somewhere…. :)