3 Posts in 24 hours, am I feeling OK?

The next major version of the popular javascript framework jQuery (1.3) is almost finished with just the last few bugs to be tracked down. John Resig, lead developer and creator of jQuery published the beta of jQuery 1.3 back in the middle of December and yesterday announced on his twitter feed that 1.3 RC1 was out although this was quickly followed with a mention that RC2 would be required due to last minute bugs. The expected release date of 1.3 is the 14th of January as indicated on the beta announcement blog post.

A summary of what’s new in 1.3:

• Selector Engine – The selector code has undergone a complete rewrite – it’s likely that some edge cases still exist here.
• DOM Manipulation (append/prepend/before/after) – This code has also undergone a large rewrite along with some of the logic for executing inline script elements.
• .offset() – Another method that has been completely rewritten.
• Event Namespaces – The logic for handling namespaced events has been completely rewritten.
• Event Triggering – When triggering an event the event now bubbles up the DOM – this is likely to cause some problems.

I have yet to have a play with the new version and indeed probably wont get the chance until it hits release but it is reassuring to see performance enhancements being implemented in this release as well as removing all browser sniffing code. I will add a little bit to my jQuery talk about the latest version.