I'd stick with 1.4 or 1.5 than 1.7 to be honest - I'm not convinced that a lot of sites are using bleeding edge anyway, but stick with what works with the code they have.
Pretty much, yeah... The only point in going for 1.7 IMHO is the use of .on() and .off() instead of .bind() and .unbind(), which makes it a bit shorter in terms of compression, but OTOH I'm not ready to add 4KB to our main JS requirements just to save a few bytes off the other files... The only argument for it, would be that v1.7.2 is widespread enough to guarantee it's in the cache. Which we can't.
In fact, you mentioned v1.4 which is what we originally had in Wedge (it was the bleeding edge when we started the project), and I think we went from 1.4 to 1.5 after doing tests in 1.6 and noticing a few issues (that were fixed in 1.7)...
At the time, we were expecting later versions to be too big and settled on 1.5 because it didn't feel as 'dated' as 1.4 was... but in reality, 1.4 was never that 'dated', it's actually after 1.4 that it went downhill and into bloatware territory. Starting with the Ajax object rewrite that I really don't need (and frankly, do you know a lot of people who use the deferred object and things like that...?), etc, it sort of became a habit of theirs to add things because they wanted to move on.
Well, it's a bit like CoffeeScript doing some smart things to help with JavaScript notation (like, replacing prototypes transparently with classes, for those who don't know about prototyping, or using "->" for functions), and then adding more things that actually make it more complicated to follow... (like, using => instead of -> to get a cache to 'this'... Okay how's that NOT hacker stuff at this point?! And what about these object definitions where if you define a multi-dimensional array, you have to add a new line between them that is *exclusively* a single comma? How ugly...)
Anyway!!
jQuery 1.4.2 = 24KB
1.4.4 = 26KB, but these 2KB are put to good use. (Some things I actually use like automatic HTML5 data loading, others are speed improvements to things I use a lot.)
1.5.0 = 29KB, adds the Ajax changes which I don't care about, and severe speed improvements for .children(), .prev() and .next(), which I make use of. (It should be noted that they're about 2x faster in 1.5, except for Chrome where they're like 10x faster, but then again speed really matters only on slow devices, like mobile...)
1.5.1/2 = 29KB, mostly fixes bugs... Also from 1.4.4?! Why didn't they release a 1.4.5...
:(So I don't know, we could even go back to v1.4.4 if we wanted, we'd just have to check for extra bugs to fix...
Having a baseline in Wedge means that everyone has a version that's consistent and will likely work better with plugins as a consequence.
Yup, but that would be an argument (only argument, if anything) for the use of v1.7.x, instead of 1.4 or 1.5...
As for the other issues, do you feel they're likely to be more or less complicated to fix? (i.e. is it going to be a significant amount of time/effort to fix or would it be better to spend that time elsewhere)
I don't know... I'll look into it again.
Posted: May 12th, 2012, 05:58 PM
Just noticed that even 1.7 has a bug...
If you cut off an animation and restart it in the other direction, it'll work (as opposed to 1.5), but next time it opens, the box shadow gets cut off (probably because of a dynamic overflow:hidden added by jQ somewhere in the process.)
I don't remember seeing this happen in 1.5... Meh.