ReSpec and jQuery 3

Hi Lovely ReSpec Users,

tl;dr: we are moving to jQuery 3. We are trying to deprecate jQuery entirely.


## jQuery v3
Just a quick note that ReSpec will now be using jQuery V3. This
shouldn't impact you at all unless you are also importing and using
ReSpec's jQuery version into your own spec - and even if you are,
jQuery v3 is, of course, backwards compatible with previous versions -
so nothing should really change for you. We've done our best to double
check existing specs are not affected + we've run "query-migrate" (a
tool provided by the jQuery foundation) to check for compat issues.
None were found.

In the odd case you are effected or just interested to know what's
new, you can read about jQuery 3 here:
http://blog.jquery.com/2016/06/09/jquery-3-0-final-released/

They also provide a migration guide, if you so require it.

## Towards deprecation of jQuery in ReSpec
Please note, I'm working hard to remove jQuery as a dependency from
ReSpec. jQuery has served us well for many years to iron over browser
interop issues and make the DOM usable. In the mean time, through the
exceptional work of folks at both the W3C, WHATWG, and the JQuery
community itself, modern browsers are 99% of the way in having native
DOM APIs that provide functionality parity with jQuery and the same
ease of manipulating the DOM.

As such, over the next year it is my plan to try to:

1. Replace jQuery with a light-weight alternative (considering
"Cash"). This will happen sooner, rather than later [1].

Cash uses modern Web APIs to implement jQuery's APIs, thus greatly
reducing both size and complexity.

 2. continue to eradicate, where possible, any calls to "$" with the
ultimate goal of removing jQuery entirely from the ReSpec Project.
I've been working hard to do this already, and would like to start
discouraging ReSpec user's from relying on jQuery. It's 2016, the
web's DOM APIs are pretty usable and interoperable now: you don't need
jQuery anymore, and we should feel really proud of that as a
community.

If for whatever reason you want to keep using jQuery (hey, I'm not
here to judge;)), then I encourage you to start importing it into your
own project through either a script tag or through a "require" call.

Would love to hear people's thoughts about the above. Please let us
know what you think in the repo:
[1] https://github.com/w3c/respec/issues/773

Received on Tuesday, 14 June 2016 06:28:18 UTC