> then it becomes so habitual that you forget how to write "regular" javascript.
This is high praise indeed, and suggests to me that a) the standard DOM APIs are poorly designed, and b) that jQuery’s API is very well designed, and meshes much better with the language.
As I write most of my Javascript at Yahoo, and we can assume that Yahoo webdevs know Javascript, but not necessarily jQuery, YUI is a much better choice. (Just addressing the language conventions, not nec. the library implementation.)
This is high praise indeed, and suggests to me that a) the standard DOM APIs are poorly designed, and b) that jQuery’s API is very well designed, and meshes much better with the language.