Deprecate jQuery.trim?

[mgol]

Description

jQuery.trim was useful for IE <9 and later to workaround an old Android Browser issue but we don't support that browsers anymore on master. It also adds one niceity that it accepts a null value that it turns to an empty string but that's it. Should we deprecate it?

Link to test case

[timmywil]

it accepts a null value

I think this might be a good enough reason to keep it. It'll be pretty small without the regex.

[mgol]

We've deprecated jQuery.proxy (#2958) even though it does a lot more than jQuery.trim. Plus, trimming is a pure JS thing & it doesn't have a lot in common with the DOM so it seems to fall a little outside of the scope of jQuery to me.

[timmywil]

Well, I was against deprecating that too. I wouldn't say it did a lot more than native bind, though. I just don't think we need to be so eager with our deprecation hammer.

[timmywil]

That brings up another point. proxy was deprecated with no intention of removal in 4.0, which I'm not really a fan of in general, but we should keep in mind that not all deprecations will get removed in 4.0. And whether it's semantic or not, I'm uncomfortable deprecating anything in a patch version, so even if we agree to deprecate jQuery.trim, I'd want to wait until 4.0.

[mgol]

Semver mandates deprecations can only happen in minor or major bumps so it can only happen in 4.0.0 or 3.5.0 if we ever decide to release that.

[dmethvin]

I don't have a strong feeling either way on this. Removing it won't change the file size that much but I'd actually prefer that people used the built-in methods rather than our utilities. As @timmywil says we don't actually need to remove it but could signal there are alternatives by deprecating.

[gibson042]

I'm very much in favor of deprecating for the same reasons as @mgol and @dmethvin. Removal would be best, but even without it we should be discouraging use of nonstandard patterns where standard ones exist (especially when the don't pertain to the primary purpose of this library).

[ShashankaNataraj]

@mgol @dmethvin May I submit a PR for deprecating jQuery.trim() ?

[mgol]

@ShashankaNataraj Sure, PRs welcome!

[mgol]

Moving the milestone to 3.5.0 (deprecations can only happen in minor or major releases and previously we didn't plan a minor bump on the 3.x line); I cherry-picked changes from PR #4461 (with some necessary modifications) in 56e73e0.