I have, actually, and straight Javascript actually isn't so bad for modern browsers, given document.querySelectorAll, etc. jQuery, at this point, is some pleas

I have, actually, and straight Javascript actually isn't so bad for modern browsers, given document.querySelectorAll, etc. jQuery, at this point, is some pleasant syntactic sugar and a whole bunch of backward-compatibility hackery. But if you're asking about writing JS without jQuery and including support for old browsers (which I've also done), then fair's fair: you have to support PHP4 (which came out about the same time as IE6), and you don't get anything other than the standard library either. For a non-trivial app, I'm not sure which of those is less pleasant.