Beginner Series: jQuery Tutorial
In addition, to all of the benefits you’ll experience when working with jQuery, there are several notable features that make it stand out from other languages.
CSS3 Selectors
When working with CSS code, selectors are patterns that can be called upon to style a particular page element.
The CSS3 selector is a new specification that will be used heavily in the future. A majority of sites are already making use of them.
You might be interested to know that one benefit of working with jQuery, is that you can also use CSS3 selectors in your production code. This just means increased support for you and more ways to create page elements and modern designs.
Helpful Utility Functions Galore
At its core, jQuery is meant to make a developer’s life easier by combining and simplifying critical syntax you would need to write out in JavaScript. It does this through an assortment of helpful utility functions that you can call upon during development.
The jQuery User Interface
Because of the power behind jQuery, it’s been used to make some pretty impressive widgets, effects, and user interface modules. These elements were useful enough that the official jQuery team decided to bundle them up and include them in the core jQuery library.
They decided early on to keep the jQuery library focused on basic use, so instead of adding the elements to the core package they created a separate one called jQuery User Interface.
The jQuery UI library includes elements like sliders, dialog boxes, date pickers, nav menu items, and accordions, all of which can be customized and themed.
jQuery Plugins
One of the added benefits of jQuery is that the team behind it has kept the core package tight and focused, remaining devoid of non-essential features. However, because of this they’ve also made sure that it’s extensible. It comes with a framework for extending the library, allowing for the use of something called plugins.
Once you create a plugin in jQuery it can be used across multiple projects. In addition, plugins can be shared with the community similar to WordPress plugins. This, in turn, means that when you start working with jQuery you have access to hundreds – if not thousands – of previously developed plugins to use on your projects. This significantly cuts down development time.
The way jQuery is structured, a lot of common functions and practices have been boiled down into a plugin. This is definitely an intended feature, not a flaw. It primarily helps you keep your syntax and final code bloat to a minimum.
Why? Because plugins can be used on a page-by-page basis instead of across an entire project. This cuts down on unnecessary bandwidth, resulting in increased loading times. It also eliminates some of the bugs or issues you might see across platforms. Finally, it’s just easier to work with and that’s that.
Next, we’ll explore What is a Javascript library?.
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