jQuery is still "necessary"?

Question

I have recently wondered about the real need to still use jQuery in new web projects. I know that he was, until recently, the best means (and for many cases the only one) of manipulating HTML elements and making Web requests without worrying about the differences between browsers and without having to write thousands of lines of code to perform simple tasks.

The following features are easily accessed today with native Javascript from browsers:

I got the idea of the functionalities from here.

I know that jQuery’s syntax is most often clearer and more compact. But the question is: jQuery is still "required"?

Note: I put the necessary in quotes, because I know there is no need in the strict sense of the word.

Answer 1

"The following features are easily accessed today with native Javascript from browsers"

And always have been, how do you think jQuery was written? jQuery is Javascript, your use is just to shorten the code. Coming from this idea, jQuery grew and became what it is today, becoming one of the best Javascript libraries.

Is it necessary? This goes from opinion to opinion. I think it depends much design. If you want something with excellent speed, use Vanilla JS. Now if it’s something standard that doesn’t need anything extreme, why not use jQuery?

You’d rather use that instead?

$('.element').animate({
  top: 50px,
  left: 50px
});

Another example is the convenience of using $('elemento.classe') to take an element of the DOM instead of document.querySelectorAll("elemento.class").

Answer 2

Why jQuery?

jQuery was launched in 2006, at a time when the most used Javascript Apis were not 100% compatible among browsers. This jQuery compatibility layer ended up with that 90% of the top 1,000,000 of websites in the world use this library. It’s a very expressive number.

^{jQuery usage data among the most visited sites in the world.}

The big point of jQuery is not the compact syntax, but the compatibility between browsers. Doing a critical analysis, the syntax of jQuery is not at all clear: you can’t say what $("#abc") is making.

Pure Javascript

But Javascript has evolved, consolidated, and matured over the years. It has a specification (ECMA-262) well defined, and today, followed by the navigators. Before this was dream.

Today, making an HTTP request with pure Javascript is very simple:

var request = new XMLHttpRequest();
request.open('POST', '/my/url', true);
request.send(data);

Another facility of jQuery are the animations, however, in 2019, this is much better executed with CSS, by using GPU and not CPU for some things.

@keyframes fadeIn {
   0% {opacity: 0;}
   100% {opacity: 1;}
} 

And the compatibility problem between the browsers was solved both by the maturation of the language and the specifications, but also by the compilers, such as the Babel. It transforms:

[1, 2, 3].map((n) => n ** 2)

in

[1, 2, 3].map(function (n) {
  return Math.pow(n, 2);
});

jQuery is still needed?

In fact, jQuery was needed, such that 90% of the world’s top 1,000,000 sites used it. It was impossible to program for each Javascript engine of 2006. But today, there are better, more performative, and more elegant alternatives to solve the most critical problem: compatibility. Maybe you don’t need jQuery.

Verbosity is not necessarily bad. And simplicity is not necessarily good.

Answer 3

It is necessary: NAY Jquery for the objectives pointed in the image is almost unnecessary (although I find it much better to use jquery to make AJAX requests) but* when you want to work with the graphical interface (make it look more beautiful, responsive) of your portal will be necessary to use some plugin or framework (if you do not want to do everything manually) they have as prerequisites the use of jquery. Some examples of frameworks you have with prerequisite jquery: JQuery UI, Twitter-Bootstrap and the Fondation.

*It is necessary the presence of Jquery but it is not mandatory the use of its functions, but as it is already present and as said in the question itself sintaxe do jQuery é na maioria das vezes, mais clara e compacta its use in this case is recommended.