[snoodle]

What's an illusion? What do you mean by bringing a "shortage of code as you may have thought"? I took the time to learn DOM, Javascript, PHP, and SQL (I already knew SQL). That along with almost 40 years of programming experience has given me the ability to understand what's holding up the JQuery code I'm writing (not to mention, simply looking at and tracing through their source code).

The comments on terse code refer to what I have to write. As far as how many machine instructions are taking place to carry that out, well, if it's few enough to result in responsiveness that is good enough for your needs, then who cares. The idea is not necessarily shrinking the entire piece of code, it's shrinking the code I have to write. Then, of course, there's the community you get to talk and exchange code with.

As far as being in a hurry, if I had to whip something together today, my fastest way to get there would be using my own framework, which I know inside-out. But everything in my framework doesnt' work on all the "A" browsers, and is simply nowhere as complete as JQuery. Not to mention, I knew that learning JQuery would help continue my education of Javascript, which it has.

Perhaps I didn't understand your comments. Where is the illusion part? What you talkin' 'bout, Willis?

The core of JQuery is actually quite small. JQuery UI and the many plug-ins that people have contributed may be where all that code you're referring to resides, and it is totally reasonable that one would not use some of those widgets, even recreating the wheel on ocassion. It's the core, the essence of JQ, the part that lays out the basic core architecture that your project will be built upon that I'm interested in (that and ongoing browser independence).