jQuery is an amazing library in the web development business world today. It allows web developers to write Javascript that would normally be huge, in very small statements, by “selecting elements” on a webpage. It was originally called jSelect, later changed due to intellectual property rights. The prototypical name jSelect was indicative of the library’s power to select individual elements within the browser. Or, more technically, within the DOM (Document Object Model).
The ability to select DOM elements, before the inception of jQuery required quite a bit of verbose Javascript code, that was at sometimes very repetitive for really no reason other than it being the traditional way of doing things. However, no library is a subsitute for core Javascript skills, and sometimes bad/slow can be written with JS that could be written with native Javascript, this is the MAIN argument against jQuery, as the overhead CAN be huge if you make huge selections, but with surgical precision it’s a tool in the same vein.
The power of Selecting DOM(document object model) elements & how it relates to your business. – What is jQuery
What is Jquery, when a element(an element is a link, a paragraph, a block of text, ETC on a webpage, although it can also be invisible if needed to store data for instance) is selected, this means you are able to access all data associated with it, including the size of the image, all CSS styles applied to the image, etc. You can manipulate the element through specific animation, hide it completely, make “popups”, live streams and much more with jQuery. So what does jQuery in 2019 look like?
What is jQuery – Trying out jQuery in your browser.
If you activate the Javascript console in your browser(CTRL SHIFT J in Chrome), on a webpage like this one, you can type commands like “jQuery(‘body’).hide()”, this command would hide the entirety of the website, so it’s probably not such a good idea, but it’s a good representation of the power avaliable with jQuery. One of the most useful things to do with jQuery is to get the width of the current window. This is usually to tell what kind of device a user is browsing on. This informs how the webpage should react. If we type in ‘jQuery(document).width()’ jQuery will return us the width of the document. Notice how document did not have to be enclosed in quotes. This is because document is a special meta concept that isn’t directly apart of the DOM. For fun, here’s a couple other examples “jQuery(‘div’).css(‘font-size’, ‘5px’)”, this will set the text inside any div to have the font size of 5px!
Closing thoughts.
jQuery truly is a cornerstone of web computing in 2019, and will only continue to get better. It’s also a fascinating language to study and experiment on for yourself. You can do literally near anything with jQuery and Javascript, make apps, slideshows, portfolios, presentations, anything! jQuery is the ‘mechanical pencil’ of Web 2.0, especially in 2019.