Having been in the industry for (eesh) 17 years+ now, I still remember (and regularly lecture on) the issue of bandwidth consumption and preservation and how poor performance is related to it. jQuery, which I love, is no pipe-hog by any stretch of the imagination, but it still comes with a bit of bloat attached in the form of methods you don’t need or use most of the time. Enter jquip, or jQuery-In-Parts, a stab at minimizing and modularizing the jQuery library. For more info and download, go to the jquip GitHub.
I’ll let you check out the rather extensive method and event list, but be assured that the things we really like about jQuery – the $(selector), the quick data methods, and several events for data handling – are all there. Plus there’s several plugins to tack on more methods and events without the total KB package jQuery sits on right now.
On the flip side, if we could just get everyone to DL the .js from the same source URL (such as //ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.0/jquery.min.js) and reinforce caching, we wouldn’t have as much problem anyway.