This month I decided to go on a jQuery diet, as a kind of fun challenge. I'd increase my familiarity with the standard DOM and selector APIs, and reduce my depe

This month I decided to go on a jQuery diet, as a kind of fun challenge. I'd increase my familiarity with the standard DOM and selector APIs, and reduce my dependency on jQuery. After a few hours of working without jQuery, it became obvious that the standard DOM & selection APIs are verbose and a little awkward. In about 20 minutes I produced a little wrapper that was compatible with a small - but common - chunk of jQuery's surface, and it made life so much more bearable. It clocked in at about 1kb minified (no GZIP). Obviously it wasn't battle hardened and didn't deal with cross browser issues, as it was just for hacking with - but it felt like proof that a wrapper of some form, if not jQuery, is pretty much always necessary