Point 1. jQuery emphasizes brevity.

The title pretty much states it all. Nearly everything I used to hate about making web pages fancy and functional is alleviated with a few lines of jQuery. With a few dollar signs here and there, you can accomplish all kinds of madness. For instance, consider the following:

$('.toHide').hide('slow');

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This little code bit slowly hides all elements on the page with the ‘toHide’ class. Conceptually, this is simple, but what have we truly accomplished? In a single line, we achieved implicit iteration [all .toHide elements], an opacity transition [hide], and timed animation [slow]. Much of the features of jQuery are available in one-liners as such. In fact, most methods return the jQuery object itself so that calls may be chained with righteousness.

$('.toHide').css('color','red').hide('slow');

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This turns all our toHide elements red and then immediately begins the hiding animation. Neat, huh? In all facets, it seems, jQuery emphasizes conciseness. From the jQuery function itself [$] to the way selectors work $(‘#myId’), everything is short. For code golfers, this should be a pleasant movement from document.getElementById(‘puke’).

Admittedly, this is but a small portion of what jQuery can do to make your life easier, and in the next post I’ll discuss the plugins architecture and its place in the mystical world of $(). If you thought firefox’s plugins were useful, you haven’t used jQuery’s.

Example: