Cesar Milan has a way with dogs; he is known as The Dog Whisperer. He manages to get even the most misunderstood dog to not be as bad as its owner makes it to be.
I thought about Cesar while having a discussion with a fellow web developer recently. This developer and I have been collaborating for the past couple months, and we’ve realized that I have slightly more tolerance for this operating system feature known as Internet Explorer. He was complaining about how he was struggling with IE and its woes, and I made the offhand remark of: I think of jQuery as “the browser whisperer”.
Yes, jQuery has made my life a ton easier and has let me rekindle a relationship that I had originally sworn off. My love/hate relationship with Javascript is more love than hate. The fact that I can take advantage of my love of patterns and use it in Javascript makes jQuery that much more favorable. But the part, for me, is its browser compatibility.
I’m glad that there’s a Javascript framework out there that makes it a more favorable option. I really like that it supports the 5 major browsers, including the one that seems to choose its own standards that rarely coincide with the rest. That’s one of the not-so-fun things in web development – browser and platform compatibility. But jQuery really makes it easier. Now I write jQuery code rather than a bunch of ifs for each browser and its Javascript idiosyncrasies.
jQuery… the browser whisperer. What do you think?