I agree that's a lot nicer. But it also looks like essentially a mechanical transformation. Instead of a runtime library (whether jquery or roll-your-own), would it be possible to handle cases like that via syntactic sugar that expands at deployment time, and doesn't require shipping a library to the end-user's browser? (Or does something like that already exist? I haven't really spent any time with CoffeeScript and other compile-to-JS languages, so it's possible they already have nice syntax for this kind of thing.)
> Instead of a runtime library (whether jquery or roll-your-own), would it be possible to handle cases like that via syntactic sugar that expands at deployment time, and doesn't require shipping a library to the end-user's browser?
You could, but that would require user-agent sniffing (and thus continuous maintenance), and would probably need a pretty unusual caching setup.
