When to use Vanilla JavaScript vs. jQuery?

Question

I have noticed while monitoring/attempting to answer common jQuery questions, that there are certain practices using javascript, instead of jQuery, that actually enable you

Answer 1

As usual I'm coming late to this party.

It wasn't the extra functionality that made me decide to use jQuery, as attractive as that was. After all nothing stops you from writing your own functions.

It was the fact that there were so many tricks to learn when modifying the DOM to avoid memory leaks (I'm talking about you IE). To have one central resource that managed all those sort of issues for me, written by people who were a whole lot better JS coders than I ever will be, that was being continually reviewed, revised and tested was god send.

I guess this sort of falls under the cross browser support/abstraction argument.

And of course jQuery does not preclude the use of straight JS when you needed it. I always felt the two seemed to work seamlessly together.

Of course if your browser is not supported by jQuery or you are supporting a low end environment (older phone?) then a large .js file might be a problem. Remember when jQuery used to be tiny?

But normally the performance difference is not an issue of concern. It only has to be fast enough. With Gigahertz of CPU cycles going to waste every second, I'm more concerned with the performance of my coders, the only development resources that doesn't double in power every 18 months.

That said I'm currently looking into accessibility issues and apparently .innerHTML is a bit of a no no with that. jQuery of course depends on .innerHTML, so now I'm looking for a framework that will depend on the somewhat tedious methods that are allowed. And I can imagine such a framework will run slower than jQuery, but as long as it performs well enough, I'll be happy.