I recently did a project that didn't use jQuery in order to keep my code smaller. It was an embedded 3rd-party widget, so keeping the code as small as possible

I recently did a project that didn't use jQuery in order to keep my code smaller. It was an embedded 3rd-party widget, so keeping the code as small as possible was a key requirement. The code I wrote supports down to IE7, but IE7 wasn't really the biggest issue. The real problem with not using jQuery is that all of the collective knowledge we have about browser inconsistencies is encapsulated in jQuery. When you run into this, and Google it, you'll find a million StackOverflow answers telling you to use jQuery, and if you get lucky a blog post from 2007 that actually answers your question. The result is that you end up spending time reverse-engineering jQuery to get your thing working. To be clear, in my case the tradeoff was worth it (the code for my entire widget including the bits of library I had to write is smaller than jQuery), but it's not a tradeoff I would make unless I had a good reason.