That's what I was thinking — imagine if you started now with things like the ES6 array & NodeList methods, etc. as the model to follow and built the same convenience methods without needing to deal with horrors like the IE6 DOM. $(foo).css("color") would still be useful but you might end up with $(".foo").forEach(…), $(foo).classList.add("foobar") or $.fetch(…) to reduce the number of new nouns and verbs a developer needs to remember.