DOM APIs didn&#x27;t suck too badly. They weren&#x27;t great, but they were usable.<p>The problem was that every old browser had its own API and feature set. Jquery abstracted over all that, including bugs in specific versions of browsers and continually is updated to handle the case of a browser claiming to implement a feature but lying.<p>Really if all browsers had the same API and feature set, there&#x27;d be no need for jQuery as it is today; you&#x27;d have a very different library.