"You might not need jQuery" -- But you have to cope with ugly syntax, browser compatibility hacks, and disconnected pieces of code. By the time you re-factor all of this, make it user friendly and lower the cognitive load, you're already re-inventing the wheel by building your own jQuery replacement, with the parts that you need.
The beauty of jQuery is working with the DOM as collections. I don't see how it's better to have all these helpers like `nextSibling`, `matches`, or `filter` thrown in the global scope or having to remember is this a real array? jQuery already built solutions for these common problems and exposes a nice API.
If all I need is querying the DOM and I don't have to support IE8 then I may consider using vanilla JavaScript, or building my own simple jQuery-esque library. But you'd start with some structure, and expose your own API. I re-invented the DOM wheel many times, and from my experience, although the code is smaller, I end up going back to jQuery because it covers some edge case or provides something else I need, like AJAX, or nice events, etc.
But building your own DOM library is a good educational challenge. Querying the DOM is all about collections, and if you don't need IE8 then you can use all the ES5 arrays methods, like map and filter. It all boils down to four functions to work with collections: toArray, unique, flatten and query. And four functions to work with the DOM: compose, join, dot, loop. See here for an example http://jsbin.com/EgIkega/1/edit. The article is more about techniques to build your own jQuery-like library; I wouldn't use "el.nextElementSibling || nextElementSibling(el)" when I can use "$(el).next()". C'mon!
Conclusion, you are probably going to use jQuery anyway.
The beauty of jQuery is working with the DOM as collections. I don't see how it's better to have all these helpers like `nextSibling`, `matches`, or `filter` thrown in the global scope or having to remember is this a real array? jQuery already built solutions for these common problems and exposes a nice API.
If all I need is querying the DOM and I don't have to support IE8 then I may consider using vanilla JavaScript, or building my own simple jQuery-esque library. But you'd start with some structure, and expose your own API. I re-invented the DOM wheel many times, and from my experience, although the code is smaller, I end up going back to jQuery because it covers some edge case or provides something else I need, like AJAX, or nice events, etc.
But building your own DOM library is a good educational challenge. Querying the DOM is all about collections, and if you don't need IE8 then you can use all the ES5 arrays methods, like map and filter. It all boils down to four functions to work with collections: toArray, unique, flatten and query. And four functions to work with the DOM: compose, join, dot, loop. See here for an example http://jsbin.com/EgIkega/1/edit. The article is more about techniques to build your own jQuery-like library; I wouldn't use "el.nextElementSibling || nextElementSibling(el)" when I can use "$(el).next()". C'mon!
Conclusion, you are probably going to use jQuery anyway.