It seems to me that if you are making a library, and therefore do not want to make assumptions about the availability of jQuery, one potential solution would be to go the route of AngularJS[1] and have a 'soft' dependency on jQuery.
In this instance you would use jQuery if it was present, but fall back on the code found in this submission if it wasn't.
Are there potential downsides to this solution that I am missing?
It seems to me that if you are making a library, and therefore do not want to make assumptions about the availability of jQuery, one potential solution would be to go the route of AngularJS[1] and have a 'soft' dependency on jQuery.
In this instance you would use jQuery if it was present, but fall back on the code found in this submission if it wasn't.
Are there potential downsides to this solution that I am missing?
[1]: http://docs.angularjs.org/api/angular.element