To start of, I'm 15, so if I don't know what I'm talking about somewhere (or you think I don't), you may be correct.

I would also like to say that I think that jQuery, Sizzle, etc. are great tools in JavaScript programming, and in no way do I wish to hurt anybody's feelings or try to infringe upon opinions.

Now for the topic at hand...

With modern desktop web browsers as well as the mobile ones starting to support more and more of HTML5 and CSS3, I begin to ponder if at one point, there won't be any need for jQuery or similar libraries.

The so called "drag and drop" for HTML5 is the start of something that will eventually evolve into something similar to jQuery UI's draggable() method. (Just using this as an example)

And these days, with CSS3 transitions and animations, what is the point in using jQuery to animate?

Animations are already built in to the browser!   Now I know that this may not be the same for every browser, such as mobile and IE, but it's still there. Chrome, Firefox, Safari, just require you to use prefixes, and that's when somebody else decides to make a library that detects your vendor prefix and animates elements accordingly. (jQuery, JSTween, etc.) But why? The prefixes are only temporary. One could say developers are too lazy to write out -webkit- and -moz-, but that's still a pretty bad excuse.

I mean, wouldn't you rather type -webkit- and -moz- a few times here and there instead of having to find a huge, bulky, JavaScript library that does something that the browsers can already do natively?

Again, don't get me wrong. jQuery is cool. I like it. I like the idea of it--the concept and what it does.

It just seems as though it won't be of as much use in the next 1/12-2 years as it was when the first version came out.

And let's not forget document.querySelectorAll(). jQuery may use Sizzle to select elements using CSS3 selectors, but once the browser makers start to implement and improve document.querySelectorAll(), why use jQuery? CSS3 selectors will just be another thing that's natively in the browser that you're constantly including in your pages regardless.

Now, I don't know (personally), what all of the things that the future of the web holds, but I think I have enough room to say that jQuery may flip.

Depending on the future, jQuery could evolve, resulting in an entire different library with different functions other than animation, DOM manipulation, AJAX, etc. Maybe canvas? (As if there aren't hundreds of plugins and other libraries for them though!  )

Again, I don't want to infringe upon opinions--these are just my thoughts out loud--to share with jQuery community. Go easy on me guys.

-Rick