This is a trend that may actually reverse in the next couple of years. JQuery's popularity has inspired a lot of new DOM API methods now present in modern brows

This is a trend that may actually reverse in the next couple of years. JQuery's popularity has inspired a lot of new DOM API methods now present in modern browsers which are starting to make it somewhat redundant. Once IE8 is out of your support picture the major DOM API normalization issues (events in particular) are out of the way. The only reason I can think of to use JQuery beyond that is that it's a dependency for a lot of libraries you use, you're supporting something other than Android/iOS on mobile or you really, really like the extras like animate, their powerful event system, extend and/or their ajax methods. That said, it's popularized a lot of useful coding methods, showed everybody how normalization should be done, and demonstrated the power of closures/factory functions to keep objects very light-weight in spite of having a ton of functionality associated with them. It's not just for client-side-illiterate noobs. Studying JQ under the hood can teach a lot about JQ. The newer JS libraries/frameworks/tools are concerning themselves more with how to implement highly complex UI in an app-maintainable way.