JQuery 1.4.4 Released

[jasonkester]

First off, thanks to the jQuery team for all the work you've put into this library. It makes a lot of lives easier.

But please stop adding features to it.

The download is already pretty fat, and already has plenty of extraneous UI fluff and DHTML stunts that detract from its core. If you really want to add a pretty "fadeToggle" effect, please make it available as an extension or stick it in jQueryUI, or otherwise don't force every single user on the entire internet to download it just so that we can do useful things like $('.disabled').each().

I know that you've got a team of smart people, and it's tempting to just keep going adding new cool stuff. But that's only going to make things worse. You need to accept the fact that your product is feature complete. Go into maintenance mode, make sure everything stays solid, and add make occasional small improvements to the core when it makes sense to do so.

It'll be painful to make that shift, but unless you do, your library will become fatter, less focused, and in the end, less useful to developers.

[simonw]

The thing that impresses me most about jQuery is how conservative they are about adding new features. If you look at the jQuery API it's hardly grown at all in all in the past 4 or 5 versions of the library. Instead, they spend their time refining the existing methods - making .width() and .height() measure hidden elements, for example.

[JoelSutherland]

This sounds good, but just isn't true. It's fairly lean, especially on effects:

http://api.jquery.com/category/effects/

When you look at that list, fadeToggle makes a lot more sense. The only helper methods are for slide and fade, the most common animation types.

[ElbertF]

An extra 30 bytes for a useful feature isn't much of a big deal if you ask me. Especially if it saves me adding a bunch of code to do the same thing.

[RedWolves]

jasonkester: in jQuery 1.4.3 a lot of work was done to make jQuery more modular. So you could take the peices of the library that you want and leave out the rest (i.e. effects).

This isn't the recommendation of the jQuery Team but if you feel the library is getting too bloated you now have the option to cherry pick only the options of jQuery you'd like to use.

Read the blog post here http://blog.jquery.com/2010/10/16/jquery-143-released/

Also we discussed it on the jQuery 1.4.3 episode of the jQuery Podcast http://podcast.jquery.com/2010/10/29/episode-38-jquery-1-4-3...

[knuckle_cake]

(Enh) .width() and .height() now report the width and height of hidden elements (#7225)

This makes me so happy I could cry.

[Griever]

Sadly it has reduced me to tears as well because I literally had to tackle this very issue only yesterday. That feature alone though is an absolute godsend.

[catechu]

I would say the same, but I think its absence has reduced me to tears enough in the past, so I'll pass. :)

[pama]

Congrats to the jQuery project. Here is the link to .fadeToggle()

http://api.jquery.com/fadeToggle/

[tav]

My only wish for 1.5 would be for the entirety of jQuery to be cajolable, i.e. be compatible with Google Caja http://code.google.com/p/google-caja/

Thanks John and the rest of the jQuery team for your brilliant work!

[admorphit]

Updated from 1.4.2 today, 1.4.4 is not available in google apis yet- $('select option[selected]') no longer returns empty string, instead, undefined is returned when no selected option is in list; be careful of any broken scripts.