Much has been written and discussed over the years with respect to selector performance -- however, the best practises have also evolved over time as performance inside of jQuery has improved, and browsers have improved (especially the advent of QSA). A lot of the literature out there on this comes from different points in history, which leads newcomers to get a skewed view of priorities. We should explain some of this history and use this article as the clearing house on what is currently "best," things like
not being overly specific in selectors
avoiding jQuery-only psuedoselectors
including quotes in attribute selectors to get into QSA
Sizzle vs. QSA
thoughts on balancing performance in fast modern browsers in QSA with oldIE
where selector performance fits into the general app performance picture
(Hoping to get a lift here from @timmywil after the Sizzle rewrite for 1.8. @crowchick proposed some content for this in #54 that could certainly be fleshed out here to anyone's heart's content)
Much has been written and discussed over the years with respect to selector performance -- however, the best practises have also evolved over time as performance inside of jQuery has improved, and browsers have improved (especially the advent of QSA). A lot of the literature out there on this comes from different points in history, which leads newcomers to get a skewed view of priorities. We should explain some of this history and use this article as the clearing house on what is currently "best," things like
(Hoping to get a lift here from @timmywil after the Sizzle rewrite for 1.8. @crowchick proposed some content for this in #54 that could certainly be fleshed out here to anyone's heart's content)