It's not necessarily a bad thing that DOM-manipulation functions are a bit annoying to type. Verbose names means that you are more likely to do: var elem =

It's not necessarily a bad thing that DOM-manipulation functions are a bit annoying to type. Verbose names means that you are more likely to do: var elem = document.getElementsByClassName('foo')[0]; elem.fooBar(); elem.foo = 'bar'; rather than $('.foo').fooBar(); $('.foo').foo = 'bar'; even if you don't know anything about writing optimized JavaScript code.