jQuery vs document querySelectorAll

Question

I heard several times that jQuery's strongest asset is the way it queries and manipulates elements in the DOM: you can use CSS queries to create complex queries that would be very hard to do in regular javascript . However , as far as I know, you can achieve the same result with document.querySelector or document.querySelectorAll, which are supported in Internet Explorer 8 and above.

So the question is this: why 'risk' jQuery's overhead if its strongest asset can be achieved with pure JavaScript?

I know jQuery has more than just CSS selectors, for example cross browser AJAX, nice event attaching etc. But its querying part is a very big part of the strength of jQuery!

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

As seen above, querySelector() methodcan only be used to access a single element while querySelectorAll() method can be used to access all elements which match with a specified CSS selector. To return all matches, querySelectorAll has to be used, while to return a single match, querySelector is used.