:nth() selector - removal plans?

[[email protected]…]

There was recently a question (the first of its kind) asked about the little-known :nth() selector, used in the sizzle.js engine, which I answered.

Link to said question here - ​http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17382703/what-is-the-nth-pseudo-class-selector-in-jquery.

As you'll see in my answer, I included an old mailing list conversation regarding the difference between the two, and when both selectors were pointed out to be equal, John Resig responded: "Huh... I should probably nuke :nth().".

Link to said mailing list conversation here - ​http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg13567.html.

I'm a little confused as to why :nth() has still not been removed considering it is seemingly exactly the same as :eq(). Are there any plans to remove it in the future? If not, why?

Side query: It appears a jsPerf was made to compare and confirm the two selectors were exactly the same; all's well when tested in desktop browsers, however there seems to be differences in speed in mobile browsers - surely those tests just anomalies? or is there anything behind it?

Link to said jsPerf - ​http://jsperf.com/eq-vs-nth

[dmethvin]

That jsperf shows there isn't any real difference. Don't get hung up on small differences.

It doesn't really buy us anything in size or performance to remove :nth so I'd be inclined to leave it in. All we'll end up doing is breaking someone's code.

Right now :nth doesn't seem to be documented, it would be worth adding an entry so that we can add the warnings used in all ​jQuery selector extensions.

[Timmy Willison]

It's just an alias. It's not documented by jQuery (because there's :eq), but it's ​documented by Sizzle.