Annotated Version of the Original jQuery Release

Recently I was prompted by Daniel Lamb to try and find old versions of jQuery for his jQuery Archive project. Thankfully I was able to find one in the Internet Archive from just a couple weeks after its release, in January 2006.

I then took that opportunity to put that code online and I used the new Genius annotation beta to mark it up with a bunch of thoughts and memories around the release of the code.

Annotated jQuery Release

The comments are kind of sprawling, they cover the code itself to the circumstances of the release. I’ll certainly add more as I think of them. Please feel free to ask questions if there are certain things that you want to learn about!

One of the things I was most touched about was just how obviously inspired I was by many great developers who came before me. I’m glad I went out of my way to credit them on the original version of the jQuery site. jQuery would not have existed if it wasn’t for Sam Stephenson creating Prototype, Simon Willison creating getElementsBySelector, Valerio Proietti creating moo.fx, and especially Dean Edwards creating so much: event binding, CSS selector libraries, DOM ready techniques and more. I cover a lot of these influences in the annotations but I want to especially thank them now as without their work I never would’ve made jQuery.

Posted: April 7th, 2015


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