Thinkful Assignment: jQuery Questions

gistfile1.txt

This assignment is to list questions I have about jQuery. However I don't have 
any questions, so I will explain what jQuery is.

jQuery has 2 main features
  1. Makes DOM manipulation easier
  2. Makes AJAX requests easier
  
DOM manipulation can be done with vanilla javascript but it's much more 
difficult. When jQuery was created web browsers were much more inconsistent 
than they are now. In order to get some DOM manipulation code to work you often 
had to write multiple versions of the code and then determine which browser the 
user was using and call the appropriate version of the code. jQuery fixes this 
by abstracting away the specific implementation details necessary for each 
browser and providing a unified API. It also provides methods that are much 
less verbose than the vanilla javascript DOM API.

The other big feature is that it makes creating XMLHttpRequest(XHR) objects 
easier. Again browsers were inconsistent in how they handled XHR objects so 
jQuery provides and abstraction layer for that as well.

Since the creation of jQuery browsers have become more consistent and the 
vanilla DOM API has gotten better so the need for jQuery has lessened. However 
it is still commonly used.