DownloadShoestring is a lightweight, modular DOM framework intended for developers who need their code to download and run as fast as possible. It is intended to be "just enough" of a tool to efficently write maintainable cross-browser JavaScript. The API is modeled after jQuery but we intentionally implement a tiny subset of the API to cover only the methods we commonly need in our projects. Each feature is built as an optional extension to a minimal core so each can be removed from the production build (dependencies between extensions are rare). The selector engine delegates to modern browsers' native document.querySelectorAll (IE8) and addEventListener (IE9), which means it requires browsers that support those features. For projects that require deeper compatibility or a richer set of features, it is simple to swap in jQuery instead. As a rule, anything that works with Shoestring should work with jQuery, but not the converse.
Features
- Shoestring's API is inspired by jQuery
- Technically, shoestring.js is a very small, extendable core function
- Using its shoestring.fn API, its core is easy to extend further, and many extensions are available for you to include in your build
- The default build includes all extensions, but it's still very small (~3kb compressed)
- If you are concerned about compatibility issues/pitfalls consider using the development build releases
- There are three sets of extensions to the Shoestring core: DOM manipulation, events, and ajax
Project Samples
