I wonder a bit why you write 'IE6-10ish' as IE7 was a big change already (not talking about IE8 or IE9, or what the other vendors did during that period). So when jquery was released, we had the split between standards and IE(6) compliant implementations already and the whole browser development started to get traction again.

So yes, the standards didn't really change during that period, but the real world implementations did. And jquery gave you a way to learn just one thing and don't care about what all those browser vendors were doing.

When IE7 was released absolutely no changes to JavaScript or HTML happened, IE just became slightly more standards compliant.

AFAIK the big thing in IE7 was that it had tabbed browsing, like FF. And slightly improved js performance, that V8 put to shame a couple of years later.

The actual split between IE6/7 and FF was mainly in the Ajax syntax, not the dom, etc.

My impression from what you're saying is that you didn't program js in the 2000s, did you? I did.

As a matter of fact, I did. But obviously, it seems that we didn't experience the events in the same way and I don't have the impression that you are even trying to understand what I am writing.