Many features inspired by popular JavaScript libraries are now available as native JavaScript APIs in today's powerful browsers. While that may seem convenient given all of the JavaScript you need to write, relying on these APIs will only make code maintenance more difficult in the long run.
In this report, Nicholas Zakas--consultant and former front-end tech leader at Yahoo!--provides a case study to show how different browsers can develop native APIs for the same specification and still end up with different interpretations. You'll discover how these APIs can tie your code to specific browsers, forcing you to upgrade application logic whenever new browsers and new browser versions are released.retrieve and manipulate DOM elements. You can also retrieve elements simply using a CSS class via the getElementsByClassName() method, which is based on the method of the same name in the Prototype JavaScript library. Add to those features native drag-and-drop, cross-domain Ajax, cross-iframe communication, client-side data storage, form validation, and a whole host of others, and it seems like browsers now are doing natively what you previously always needed a JavaScript library to do. Does that mean it's time to give up our libraries in favor of native APIs?