A new release is available now for jQuery JavaScript library. Existing public APIs have been maintained, which means existing plugins should work just fine. Many new features, performance improvements, and method changes are in this release, but let's look at a few of the major developments:
- No More Browser Sniffing: jQuery 1.3 no longer uses any form of browser/userAgent sniffing internally (the first major JavaScript library to do so. jQuery now uses a technique called feature detection, wherein a particular browser feature or bug is simulated to verify its existence.
- Sizzle Selector Engine: The new CSS selector engine (nicknamed Sizzle")
is faster than the current engine (49% faster in fact), standalone and
fully extensible.
- Live Events: jQuery now supports "live events" (events that can be
bound to all current and future elements using event delgation and a
seamless jQuery-style API.
- jQuery Event Object: The event system for jQuery has been refactored,
and now encapsulates all of the functionality found W3C-compliant event
object implementation and makes it work smoothly across all browsers.
- HTML Injection Rewrite: Code related to injectiving HTML into a
document has been overhauled. Append, prepend, and before and after
methods are now much faster. The creation of DOM elements has also been
modified.
- Offset Rewrite: The offset method was completely rewritten and now
handles cross-browser issues better and faster (3x improvement in
performance).