Shows me Its really time to close these comments. Thanks to all of you who expressed your opinion without trolling.

@David Walsh: I’ve never seen/experienced the kind of open hostility people like kamicane are showing coming from the jQuery community or the Prototype community. I’m sure there have been circumstances, but none directed at me.

@kamicane: I read the article, you don’t need to act like a jerk and insult people. Seriously, all your doing is mimicking the behavior I was addressing in my comment. In that comment, I wasn’t addressing the blog, I was addressing the community responding to the blog. I responded to the blog in an earlier comment but am really more concerned over the communities response.

By saying that MooTools is not a shared piece of code used in other js libraries, you are really splitting hairs. Plugins are developed for MooTools, they all share the MooTools base code. Everyone who uses MooTools in their development projects extends the MooTools base code for the functionality they need. I’m not going to refute your comments one by one, you’re probably smart enough to figure out what they mean if you want to, and if you don’t want to then no amount of explaining on my part is going to do it.

@w00fz: I was addressing one particular argument above that was saying that all the selector libraries are just as good and further innovation unlikely, so why should MooTools adopt an open source version. To that I responded, that this is an argument to adopt it, instead of not adopting it.

@ALL: It’s your library, not mine. Have fun, do what you want. FWIW, in the contest of library names, MooTools wins hands down.

How can you say there is no more innovation to be had? :) What’s nice about innovation is that you cannot predict where is it going to go. Would you ever expect 10 years ago what direction would the Web have taken and what we’d have today? Sounds to me you’re hazarding a guess, which surely isn’t good for innovation, it’s just good for stopping it.

Nice post Valerio, btw.

• Djamil

“ok, sorry for the sarcasm, but mootools is a perfect example of a common open source library that is used in multiple projects and everyone benefits from it that uses it.” MooTools is not a shared piece of code used in other javascript libraries. Maybe you should take a look at http://www.mootools.net

“I’m quite shocked to hear someone who is a proponent of mootools, which I assume you are, speaking against open source libraries. ” This makes me just think you didnt read the article, so I wont even comment.

“I’ll betcha 20 bucks that John would help figure it out if asked instead of attacked for asking if you wanted to collaborate.” True, but we dont care. its very well written in the article: we like our code best, and its more mantainable for us.

“and $(‘.myClass:nth-child(even)’).hide(); // lots more code in between $(‘.myClass:nth-child(even)’).show(); is a lot more readable to me then var evenTableRowsFor3rdTable = $(‘.myClass:nth-child(even)’); evenTableRowsFor3rdTable.hide(); //lots more code between evenTableRowsFor3rdTable.show();” We have a very different concept of readability and code practices then.

“Personally, I think there is a lot more credibility to lose in being the last hold out to not adopt a common framework unless there is a significant savings by not going with it.” I acknowledge your point of view, but for us is very different. If you didnt get it from the article itself, there is nothing much I can do to make you understand. We just disagree.

“why roll your own?” Because we can do it better.

“Do not the benefits of going with the standard outweigh the benefits of rolling your own? ” No.

“And even if you have already rolled your own, why not adopt a standard even if there are advantages to your own particular code.” Because there are only disadvantages.

“Do you want to be like IE” Explorer does a very different thing. He doesnt respect W3C standards. Both Sizzle and MooTools Do. But Firefox and Safari, for instance, both do too, and they use very different code. This benefits everyone, much more than if Firefox and Safari used the same Javascript engine. I think you’re missing the point of the article.

However, I agree that there is a lot of hating going on in the comments (see, we agree on something). Be nicer everyone.

I have a question for you Josh Powell: Did you even read the article? Because it surely seems that you’ve only read the comments.

That’s exactly the point. Since there is no more innovation to be had (because of all the innovative work the library developers have already put in), why roll your own? Do not the benefits of going with the standard outweigh the benefits of rolling your own? And even if you have already rolled your own, why not adopt a standard even if there are advantages to your own particular code. All the standards-based arguments apply here.

Do you want to be like IE (we don’t need no stinking standards) or the rest of the browser community? (okay, cheap shot :) )

“At least someone stands up to fight.” What fight? people collaborating is now a fight?

“Totally agree that everyone using the same selector engine would be unethical.” Unethical? collaborating with people outside the mootools community is unethical?

“that John Resig doesn’t just care about great code, but always about wanting to be an internet legend. ” Wow, just wow.

“Why is John Resig so keen to get other frameworks to adopt sizzle (if he really is writing letters)? It seems to me a little egotistical.” Now, I don’t know John personally. But he’s done a lot of work that makes my life a lot easier. So, I might be a little biased here, but I don’t think trying to get people to work together and share a common code base is egotistical.

“I agree totally with you :) And one of the problems I see adopting Sizzle is that Sizzle is ‘naked’ and can’t take some advantages on some predefined methods in Mootools and also I don’t know how how extend() can be implemented in Sizzle’s code” I’ll betcha 20 bucks that John would help figure it out if asked instead of attacked for asking if you wanted to collaborate.

“I think it is important that Valerio took some significant effort to understand why Sizzle appeared so much faster and to create a fair comparison.” Fair? By cutting out Sizzle’s most significant advantage and testing against it? Look guys,

var myVar = $(‘myId’);

is caching. John just moved it into the library. and

$(‘.myClass:nth-child(even)’).hide(); // lots more code in between $(‘.myClass:nth-child(even)’).show();

is a lot more readable to me then

var evenTableRowsFor3rdTable = $(‘.myClass:nth-child(even)’); evenTableRowsFor3rdTable.hide(); //lots more code between evenTableRowsFor3rdTable.show();

“I just ran your test and Sizzle was faster, making this statement an outright lie:” Is it really necessary to be so confrontational and attack someone verbally? A lie? how about they were just incorrect and that on all of the systems they tested it on it was faster and they didn’t purposefully exclude any results that showed this statement to be false and you happened to find a different configuration where it was.

“Viva la resistance.” resisting what? Working together with other libraries. Is mootools a pirate library? french revolution library?

“Mootools would lose credibility and respect if it were to adopt Sizzle.”  ??? Wha? Why? Are you implying that people would think that MooTools is inferior because they worked with other people in the industry and adopted a consistent framework for a component of their library that is a commodity? Personally, I think there is a lot more credibility to lose in being the last hold out to not adopt a common framework unless there is a significant savings by not going with it.

“I think the fact that the 5x speed increase claimed by Sizzle is in fact nothing more than a hoax.” Puffery perhaps, but I don’t think John was maliciously trying to fool anyone. I bet he does have the data to back it up.

Honestly though people, while some good reasons were given to not adopt Sizzle and with well reasoned logic, there was a lot of unnecessary hating going on. As this is my first experience with the mootools community just let me say, it has been quite unpleasant and leaves me not really wanting to learn and use mootools if I’m going to have to be fighting with people instead of working with them.

Everybody should fix their broken CSS selector implementations instead of playing kid games with numbers.

Let’s face it, most libraries have partially “invented” and adapted their own specs…tweaked their benchmark up and down several times and even though are not faster in any area on selectors.

The return result sets must be in the order the elements were encountered in the document. Look at both Safari and FF implementations in case you disagree.

By not fixing this as a first point will make troublesome for developers to build reliable test units with the pains it will create. And everybody will have to trust these incorrect tests.

It was the same with XPATH or at least there was a way to force that with an option. With the new Selector API it is not different.

This is the reason everybody needs to redo their home work or just go with NWMatcher.

I already suggested some tips to Sizzle that will make easy fixing at least the “document order” but if you believe I am trying to monopolize the world you could just skip that too…

I can’t say I am a frequent visitor here, though the few times I was, I have found the same bad attitude with collaboration and exactly the same war with John Resig, is that to fill up your time or what ? Better using that time to fix your beloved selectors !

— Diego

Um, ok. How about.. let’s see here, mootools?

And I’m touching this because of unhealthy state of today’s JavaScript libraries’ communities. We just can’t get along, thinking it’s a football match or a war.

It’s false, everybody benefits from new code and new discussions!