As far as I've seen, most of the benefits of jQuery come from allowing modern features to degrade gracefully in older web browsers, and for the various plugins people have written. Otherwise, IMHO, requiring an 85k library to call a function with one line of code that might've taken 5 or 6 lines to write without the library is just lazy and wasteful. The minimal benefit does not justify the cost. I guess I'm too much a crotchety old luddite to understand why jQuery is so popular. My prejudice against jQuery may not be fair, but I just want jQuery to get off my lawn. :)