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I just asked this question at SO about some bugginess I am experiencing with jQuery and IE8, and someone commented that he was appalled that I would mix JavaScript with jQuery (he has since deleted his comment for some reason).

This person had a high reputation, relative to mine (3000+), so I don't want to ignore his criticism. I'm still relatively new to web development, and I mostly work alone, so I wasn't aware that this could be a problem. Why should mixing the two be avoided?

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<offhand comment> Yes it is appaling you would mix JavaScript with jQuery. avoid it. </off hand comment>. Seriously though the only thing strange is lack of consitency either use mostly jQuery or mostly javascript. Don't go for a 50/50 mix. – Raynos Nov 8 '11 at 16:06
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I'm sure the reason that he deleted his comment is that he realized that he sounded foolish. – Adam Crossland Nov 8 '11 at 16:07
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Did that user have a lot of rep from the JavaScript or jQuery tags? A C# ninja would have a high rep, but not know how to answer a question on e.g. Fortran and might hold a number of ill-conceived opinions about it. – StuperUser Nov 8 '11 at 16:08
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@Chad javascript sexually transmitted disease? – Raynos Nov 8 '11 at 16:17
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Like jAIDS or jCLAP, nothing to trifle with. The only safe library is abstinence! – Chris Nov 8 '11 at 16:19
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4 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

The issue, and likely, the reason for the comment, seems to be the lines with document.getElementById('firstName');. jQuery can do the exact same thing, and it's generally "safer", since it handles differences between browsers nicely.

The best rule of thumb to follow is use jQuery a DOM manipulation library of your choice (for many people, this is jQuery) to manipulate the DOM, and javascript for everything else you need to do.

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Not that what you're saying is wrong, but the reason I selected those items that way was because later I wanted to do quick string manipulation that I thought would be easier and faster with basic js – tjb1982 Nov 8 '11 at 16:10
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The best rule of thumb is to use <cross browser manipulation of choice>. And I can defiantly say jQuery is not that one for me, however on the grand scheme of things, it's not that bad – Raynos Nov 8 '11 at 16:10
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@tjb1982: that sort of micro-optimization rarely pays. It almost never pays in user interface development, because users are really slow and the number of objects on the screen is small. – kevin cline Nov 8 '11 at 20:21
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up vote 15 down vote

People like being black and white.

If you're going to use a cross browser normalization tool then use it. Don't use it to normalize some things but not others.

Example

var a = $("#foo");
var b = document.getElementById("bar");

Those two should not be mixed. Either you use jQuery for edge case bugs you might care about or you use the DOM for speed, but not both.

And yes personally I would also say:

WTF, write your code more coherently, why are you mixing DOM calls with jQuery calls.

As a side-note, you can assume that when he says "javascript and jQuery" he means "calls to the DOM API directly in javascript and calls to the DOM API through the jQuery abstraction layer". Any other comment would be misinformation / trolls.

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+1 great clarification, though explaining that you should avoid mixed dom and jquery calls is much more effective than the attack WTF. – Chad Nov 8 '11 at 16:24
@Chad an off hand WTF without explanation is silly. However for some people (me included) it's all too easy to mock people for using bad practices when they simply don't know better. It's quite easy to assume people know better then they do. – Raynos Nov 8 '11 at 16:27
The code in the original SO question would not get past my code review, that's for sure. Don't mix jQuery selectors with getElementById. – Carson63000 Nov 9 '11 at 3:06
@Carson63000 agreed. Always use getElementById – Raynos Nov 9 '11 at 3:43
@Raynos: use whatever you like but make it consistent. :-) – Carson63000 Nov 9 '11 at 4:52
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up vote 2 down vote

Some programmers tends to think in terms of what a tutorial or some programmer guru states.

Most probably, it would be easier to have the same framework used in your application to make the code easier to read and to understand.

But most of the times, frameworks have limitations or bugs so you can never apply what the tutorial or some programmer guru states.

I guess the most important is to satisfy the customer and to ship a bug free application

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up vote 5 down vote

Not sure where such criticism would come from, seeing as jQuery is javascript.

The comment seems to have been deleted, so it is difficult to say exactly what the criticism was about. Could be more about your usage of jQuery or javascript.

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The comment read: My god... why do you mix jquery and js?? – tjb1982 Nov 8 '11 at 16:05
Silly comment, which is probably why it isn't there anymore. – Oded Nov 8 '11 at 16:06
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