Yes, most websites use jQuery these days (including all of Coursera), but it'd be better if there was a standard way to write UI libraries that did not depend on any libraries, and the UI library would only bring the libraries in that it truly needed. Plus, some of the best plugins are dependent on jQuery UI, since it includes the widget factory and offers features like draggable/sortable, and jQuery UI is a heavy addition to an app that isn't otherwise using it. It's also often difficult to use the jQuery UI JS without the CSS and its subsequent look & feel.
After trying to write some custom Coursera UI widgets as jQuery plugins, we decided that it might be more useful for us to start over and figure out how to architect our UI libraries for everything that we wanted out of them. We wanted many of the things that developers want in jQuery plugins, like customization and events, but we also wanted zero dependencies, AMD-compatibility, designer-friendly declarative usage, and more.
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