What is the difference between D3 and jQuery?

Question

Referring to this example:

http://vallandingham.me/stepper_steps.html

it seems that the D3 and jQuery libraries are very similar in the sense that they both do D

Answer 1

I've been using a little of both lately. Since d3 uses Sizzle's selectors you can pretty much mix up selectors.

Just keep in mind d3.select('#mydiv') doesn't return quite the same as jQuery('#mydiv'). It's the same DOM element, but it's being instantiated with different constructors. For example, let's say you have the following element:

And let's grab some common methods:

> d3.select('#mydiv').attr('rel') ;
 "awesome div"

> jQuery('#mydiv').attr('rel');
 "awesome div"

Seems legit. But if you go a little further:

> d3.select('#mydiv').data();
 [undefined]

> jQuery('#mydiv').data();
 Object {hash: "654687867asaj"}