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What jQuery Can’t Do

Posted at Feb 24, 2011 9:54:46 AM by Joey Wolff | Share

Computers – and their programmers – speak a language all their own. The pages that we load when we are searching for information, products, or entertainment are the faces of the pages, but what lies beneath is the code, or the foundation, of the site. While we don’t see this, per se, it allows for websites to be interactive. jQuery is a tool that allows you to build webpages with Javascript faster and easier. You can add animations to your site, create drop-down menus, drag-and-drop features, and much more. jQuery is a tremendously useful tool – but what can’t you do with this Javascript library?

There is quite a lot that you can’t do with jQuery, and this is not indicative of a design flaw or an inferior product. In fact, many programmers regard jQuery as an excellent tool and first-rate Javascript library. The limitations come, then, from jQuery’s boundaries. It is simply not designed to do everything as Javascript is. Instead, it is designed to be a short cut for some Javascript functions. The goal is to make building a website faster and easier. Many designers like it because they don’t have to know the language inside and out before they create a page and that it uses far less code than Javascript.

As an example, jQuery itself doesn’t allow the concatenation function, but you can still join two or more strings because Javascript has that functionality. Addy Osmani describes Javascript as art: “Your keyboard becomes your brush and the browser becomes your canvas…jQuery provides a proverbial ‘Paint by Numbers’ tool for us.” Under jQuery is Javascript, “it’s a big pile of Javascript that draws a curtain between you and Javascript.” As such, it makes certain functions easier, but doesn’t let you do everything you can with Javascript.

Tags: Web Development, Web Design, General

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