Cash: The Featherweight Champion of JavaScript Libraries

In the world of web development, where every kilobyte counts (because we’re all obviously obsessed with squeezing every last byte out of our pages), there exists a library that dares to dream big by going small. Meet Cash, the jQuery alternative that's so tiny you might just overlook it amidst the mountains of JavaScript heft you’re serving for ads you didn’t even want.

At a minuscule 6 KB when gzipped, Cash is pretty much the Tom Thumb of the library world. It’s designed for modern browsers (sorry, Internet Explorer, you had a good run but it's over) and promises a jQuery-style syntax to manipulate the DOM without the baggage of jQuery itself. In other words, it's all the fun of jQuery syntax without that full 24.4 KB weighing down your page. But then, does that really matter in an era when your average web page serves enough JavaScript to power a small city?

And yet, jQuery remains prevalent across the web, happily running on 77% of the world’s top 10 million websites. It’s as if nobody got the memo that React, Angular, and Vue should have taken that victory lap by now. But let’s face it: when something works, especially on the tangled web of legacy code, nobody's in a hurry to start untangling it.

So, what can you do if you want to strip things down even further and go native? In modern browsers, you can get away with a mere two lines of code:

dQuery = document.querySelector.bind(document);
dQueryAll = document.querySelectorAll.bind(document);

garfield = dQuery('#garfield');
allCats = dQueryAll('.all-cats');

Voilà! Who needs Cash or any other library when you have utility functions that make DOM manipulation just as accessible and keep your code as pristine and lightweight as that handcrafted organic tea you pretend to like?

Why not just use plain JavaScript?

In summary, Cash is the library equivalent of a protein bar: lightweight, not always necessary, but surprisingly functional. For the purists and minimalists out there, resorting to a million-dollar library to move a pixel seems absurd, but hey, that's the web for you.