Leverage knowledge of CSS. . By basing the mechanism for locating page elements on CSS selectors, jQuery inherits a terse yet legible way of expressing a document’s structure. Because a prerequisite for doing professional web development is knowledge of CSS syntax, jQuery becomes an entry point for designers who want to add behavior to their pages.

Support extensions. . In order to avoid feature creep, jQuery relegates special-case uses to plug-ins. The method for creating new plug-ins is simple and well-documented, which has spurred the development of a wide variety of inventive and useful modules. Even most of the features in the basic jQuery download are internally realized through the plug-in architecture, and can be removed if desired, yielding an even smaller library.

Abstract away browser quirks. . An unfortunate reality of web development is that each browser has its own set of deviations from published standards. A significant portion of any web application can be relegated to handling features differently on each platform. While the ever-evolving browser landscape makes a perfectly browser-neutral code base impossible for some advanced features, jQuery adds an abstraction layer that normalizes the common tasks, reducing the size of code, and tremendously simplifying it.

Always work with sets. . When we instruct jQuery, Find all elements with the class ‘collapsible’ and hide them, there is no need to loop through each returned element. Instead, methods such as .hide() are designed to automatically work on sets of objects instead of individual ones. This technique, called implicit iteration, means that many looping constructs become unnecessary, shortening code considerably.

Allow multiple actions in one line. . To avoid overuse of temporary variables or wasteful repetition, jQuery employs a programming pattern called chaining for the majority of its methods. This means that the result of most operations on an object is the object itself, ready for the next action to be applied to it.