Before jQuery there was Prototype.js, part of early AJAX support in RoR, which fixed inconsistencies in how browsers could fetch data, especially in the era between IE 5 and 7 (native JS `XMLHttpRequest` was only available from IE 7 onwards, before that it was some ActiveX thing. The other browsers supported it from the get go). My memory is vague, but it also added stuff like selectors, and on top of that was script.aculo.us which added animations and other such fanciness.

jQuery took over very quickly though for all of those.

jQuery in ~2008 was when it kinda took off, but jQuery was itself an outgrowth of work done before it on browser compatibility with JavaScript. In particular, events.

Internet Explorer didn’t support DOM events, so addEventListener wasn’t cross-browser compatible. A lot of people put work in to come up with an addEvent that worked consistently cross-browser.

The DOMContentLoaded event didn’t exist, only the load event. The load event wasn’t really suitable for setting up things like event handlers because it would wait until all external resources like images had been loaded too, which was a significant delay during which time the user could be interacting with the page. Getting JavaScript to run consistently after the DOM was available, but without waiting for images was a bit tricky.

These kinds of things were iterated on in a series of blog posts from several different web developers. One blogger would publish one solution, people would find shortcomings with it, then another blogger would publish a version that fixed some things, and so on.

This is an example of the kind of thing that was happening, and you’ll note that it refers to work on this going back to 2001:

https://robertnyman.com/2006/08/30/event-handling-in-javascr...

When jQuery came along, it was really trying to achieve two things: firstly, incorporating things like this to help browser compatibility; and second, to provide a “fluent” API where you could chain API calls together.

I wasn't clear, jQuery was definitely used for browser inconsistencies, but in behaviour, but layout. It had just a small overlap with CSS functionality (at first, until it all got exposed to JS)

Probably 2005.

2002, I was using “JSRS”, and returning http 204/no content, which causes the browser to NOT refresh/load the page.

Just for small interactive things, like a start/pause button for scheduled tasks. The progress bar etc.

But yeah, in my opinion we lost about 15 years of proper progress.

The network is the computer came true

The SUN/JEE model is great.

It’s just that monopolies stifle progress and better standards.

Standards are pretty much dead, and everything is at the application layer.

That said.. I think XSLT sucks, although I haven’t touched it in almost 20 years. The projects I was on, there was this designer/xslt guru. He could do anything with it.

XPath is quite nice though

Wasn't it more about inconsistencies in JS though? For stuff which didn't need JS at all, there also shouldn't be much need for JQuery.