Are all the jQuery selectors CSS selectors? If so, is the ID attribute of HTML a CSS selector?

Answer 1

This is a good question and will probably lead you to question the use of jQuery. the precise answer is no, as jQuery has some non-CSS-selectors while due to being JavaScript, certain CSS selectors (e.g. like :after) cannot be implemented.

However, you are rightfully noticing a lot of similarities. The native implementation of querySelector does pretty much the same by now, so jQuery selectors have lost their attractiveness in recent years. You don't save much characters any more but make your code very expensive (performance wise) comparatively.

let collectContent = [];

// jQuery version

$('.item').each(function(){

collectContent.push($(this).text());

})

// plain JS

document.querySelectorAll('.item').forEach(element => {

collectContent.push(element.innerText);

})