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New features in jQuery 3

III

Article from ADMIN 35/2016

By Tim Schürmann

The functions and objects of the jQuery JavaScript library make the work of web developers much easier. Although jQuery 3 remains largely compatible with version 2, some changes might prevent its use.

Using the JavaScript library jQuery [1], developers can access elements of a web page, manipulate them, handle events conveniently, and communicate with the server via Ajax with very little effort. In this way, jQuery helps build complex, dynamic web applications. Its wide distribution also helps promote large content management systems (CMSs) like Joomla or WordPress, which provide or even use jQuery themselves. A W3Techs [2] statistic even suggests that jQuery is used on two-thirds of all websites worldwide.

Dismantling

On June 9, 2016, the developers released jQuery version 3.0 [3]; an update followed as early as the beginning of July in the form of version 3.1 [4]. Unlike jQuery 2, the newer version does not include basic modifications to the library. Instead, the new version cuts out a few old habits and changes the behavior of some interfaces. Above all, the developers wanted to make jQuery 3 leaner and faster in response to two commonly cited points of criticism.

First, they have removed a few workarounds for Internet Explorer. Unlike many websites and reports suggest, jQuery 3 officially continues to support Internet Explorer from version 9. Anyone wanting to cut their website on older Microsoft browsers should stick to jQuery 2 or jQuery 1.12 – both version will continue to receive bug fixes.

Up to now it was possible to register event handlers using the methods .load(), .unload(), and .error(). However, these methods have been regarded as deprecated since jQuery 1.8 and are gone for good in jQuery 3. Anyone who wants to register event handlers should now use .on().

The offset() function

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