jQuery 1.3 Has A New CSS Selector Engine
For the third time since the first launch in year 2006, jQuery Development Team released a new version of the popular JavaScript library: jQuery 1.3. Beside a fast new CSS selector engine, named Sizzle, the latest version of jQuery library comes with notable features like live events, HTML injection rewrite and other.
The CSS selector engine incorporated into jQuery version 1.3 is faster than the previous one with 49%, fully extensible and completely standalone (without any dependencies). Another useful feature introduced in the current jQuery release is the possibility of defining live events which can be bounded to the existing or new elements.
jQuery event system was redesigned, the new jQuery.Event object providing the necessary functionality corresponding to a standard W3C compliant event definition. On the other hand, the HTML injection rewrite supposes the usage of a faster code for HTML injection management, like in the case of the append or prepend method. In the same time, the creation of DOM elements is faster, as compared with the previous version of jQuery.
Also, jQuery 1.3 shows a new .offset() method that was fully rewritten for a better handling of cross-browser issues with an increased performance and starting from this version, the library will not use internal browser sniffing (the alternative chosen is feature detection).
The process of upgrading from a previous jQuery version is simplified due to the fact that all existing public APIs are maintained. jQuery version 1.3 is available for free download as compressed version (the size of only 18 kb was obtained with YUI compressor) or uncompressed (suitable for debugging).
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