> Instead of a runtime library (whether jquery or roll-your-own), would it be possible to handle cases like that via syntactic sugar that expands at deployment

> Instead of a runtime library (whether jquery or roll-your-own), would it be possible to handle cases like that via syntactic sugar that expands at deployment time, and doesn't require shipping a library to the end-user's browser? You could, but that would require user-agent sniffing (and thus continuous maintenance), and would probably need a pretty unusual caching setup.