My first thought about a jQuery standards team was that they would rate plugins on "adheres to jQuery interface standard". Too many times I grab some contributor's plugin for adding behavior to primitives, only to find out that they taint the namespace unnecessarily or depart from jQuery's query-and-return model and require invasive workarounds to conform. jQuery is really flexible; many "plugins" are not.

One of the most intriguing parts of this endeavor is utilizing GitHub's issue tracker - https://github.com/jquery/standards/issues - to openly discuss and debate topics that the standards group should be lobbying.

Here's another interesting use of the issue tracker by Paul Irish (of the jQuery Standards Team): https://github.com/paulirish/lazyweb-requests/issues

Thank you so very much for this. I'm a fan of all things Paul Irish and now I'm making my way through the list in great detail.

I think browser DOM should just embed a native implementation of jQuery.

Inconsistency across browsers was one of the things that inspired the development of the various js libraries we use today, including jQuery. Despite the existence of standards (even standards with comprehensive test cases), they are needed to abstract away the differences between the IE, Firefox, Safari etc DOMs.

If browsers were to embed a native implementation of jQuery, you'd then have to have some kind of meta-jQuery library to abstract away the differences between IE jQuery, Safari jQuery and Firefox jQuery (etc).

Then you'd be stuck supporting old versions of jQuery.

Why not have it the other way around? Have the webpage define the DOM implementation. Taken to its extremes, that would basically solve backward-compatibility.

> Then you'd be stuck supporting old versions of jQuery.

No, support only core functions of jQuery. All of them.

You know what is old version? Stuff like getElementById() .

This is interesting. jQuery started as a way to smooth over the variations delivered by different browser implementations. So by it's nature it's goal is delivering a better experience for developers using JS.

The tension i see is that browser implementations by their very nature are a deviation and departure from the standard. jQuery is a repair process on someone else's broken shit. So, jQuery has lots of anti-patterns for how things shouldn't be done, and some of the workarounds that are actively in deployment.

It'll be interesting to see whether this injects a voice for sanity and practicality into the discussion process, or whether this will just make conversations about standards more vociferous.

This is great, developers could use a voice at the W3C. Wait, how did they do that awesome effect with the screenshot that's slanted and angled like that? Is that a special filter, or did they do that in Photoshop?

Right click. View Image.

I know, I saw. My question is, how did they do that?

Only 2 people in this standards team?

A small but significant increase from zero people.