The argument that its not the BBC's project doesn't hold water, you are using someone else's web server technology (Apache?), someone else's programming languag

The argument that its not the BBC's project doesn't hold water, you are using someone else's web server technology (Apache?), someone else's programming language (Java? So, Sun... now Oracle), another company developed the hardware, doubleclick to serve your ads, pulse for your surveys, why not also jQuery for your js library? You also did not need to branch jQuery, as if you had contributed to it then screen reader support would already be in its core now, or available via plugins. The point is, that with libraries that are truly open source like jQuery, all that work put into glow could have been put into jQuery. No branching necessary. If jQuery chose to drop support for a browser you felt was necessary, you could have simply not upgraded to the next version of jQuery or complain about it and offer to do the work to make it compatible with those browsers. Plus you would have been benefiting from the serious testing that the jQuery team puts jQuery through. All that testing and bug fixing is work the Glow team does not need to do, or at least bugs that the Glow team doesn't need to fix themselves. I've used jQuery as the example here, because I feel its the best choice, but Prototype, Dojo, Mootools, ExtJS, could have also been good choices, though only Dojo of the four has such open contribution to the core as jQuery. On a side note, something you guys may want to look into is concatenating, minifying, and gzipping your js and css files. It could reduce the js/css file size and number of http requests by as much as 2/3 on your pages.