Ajax Girl

Paul Irish put together a bit of history in the form of the Javascript CSS selector engine timeline which shows us that “selector processing power has gone from Pinto power to a Mustang GT 500.”

• 2003.03.25: document.getElementsBySelector() by Simon Willison (later used in behaviour.js) [source]
• 2005.08.19: CssQuery(): by Dean Edwards [source]
• 2005.08.22: jSelect (precursor to jQuery) [source]
• 2006.01.18: Prototype. Initial release of selector engine. [source]
• 2006.03.21: jQuery first release. [source]
• 2006.04.04: moo.dom (precursor to mootools) [source]
• 2006.08.26: jQuery 1.0 [source]
• 2006.11.14: Mochikit Selector. (orig. ported from prototype) [source]
• 2007.01.08: jQuery 1.1a (”10-20x faster than 1.0″) [source]
• 2007.01.11: DomQuery by Jack Slocum (ExtJS). [source]
• 2007.02.05: dojo.query(). [source]
• 2007.05.01: Prototype 1.5.1 [source]
• 2007.05.07: Mootools 1.1 [source]
• 2007.07.01: jQuery 1.1.3 (”800% faster”) [source]
• 2007.07.10: Ext 1.1 RC1 [source]
• 2007.12.04: YUI 2.4.0 [source]

Thanks to all of the innovations along the way, and to Paul to putting this together.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/216410624/javascript-css-selector-engine-timeline