I have experience in jQuery and javascript, so I'll give you my 2 cents on that, but I'm sure the same can be applied to other frameworks. jQuery is awesome fr

I have experience in jQuery and javascript, so I'll give you my 2 cents on that, but I'm sure the same can be applied to other frameworks. jQuery is awesome framework and its core (the way I see it) is simple. It's about: 1) DOM selection, traversal and manipulation 2) CSS manipulation 3) event binding 4) ajax 5) a couple of (but still awesome) utilities 6) extensibility, as proven with very popular jQueryUI framework and a huge number of plugins You know where I got these 6 bullets? It's from jQuery docs page (http://docs.jquery.com/Main_Page http://docs.jquery.com/Main_Page) under API reference (in the left sidebar). Why is it important? Because that's actually what the whole browser/DOM/javascript ecosystem should have been. DOM API is really screwed up, that's why we use jQuery (or something else, but I also think jQuery has clearly won the framework war). And to do any of that work, among all A grade browsers is an exercise in futility. Majority of my work in javascript consists of leveraging jQuery, because most of my work is DOM manipulation. But that doesn't mean I can do it without knowing the language. My point is: jQuery is defacto the DOM API because the real DOM API simply sucks. It does not replace the need to use the language, it adds value to it. And maybe, just maybe, we haven't yet seen the best way to work with DOM, or ajax. There may still be posible for completely new framework to emerge and shows us the light.