Shrinking existing libraries as a goal

In the past year or so, I've participated in a number of threads that were
implicitly about adding features to browsers that would shrink the size of
existing libraries.

Inevitably, those discussions end up litigating whether making it easier
for jQuery (or some other library) to do the task is a good idea in the
first place.

While those discussions are extremely useful, I feel it would be useful for
a group to focus on proposals that would shrink the size of existing
libraries with the implicit assumption that it was a good idea.

>From some basic experimentation I've personally done with the jQuery
codebase, I feel that such a group could rather quickly identify enough
areas to make a much smaller version of jQuery that ran on modern browsers
plausible. I also think that having data to support or refute that
assertion would be useful, as it's often made casually in meta-discussions.

If there is a strong reason that people feel that a focused effort to
identify ways to shrink existing popular libraries in new browsers would be
a bad idea, I'd be very interested to hear it.

Thanks so much for your consideration,

Yehuda Katz
jQuery Foundation
(ph) 718.877.1325