I was recently required to create a simple fadeIn/fadeOut hover script for a client, and I opted to use my favourite technique: the jQuery library. However, my client was uncomfortable with all the extra functionality that comes with jQuery, and I couldn't convince them that a minified/gzipped/cached jQuery script was good enough, just on the principal that a small custom minified/gzipped/cached script would be even better. At first I decided that it would be fairly easy to check the jQuery source out of SVN and compile a smaller version without all the functions that I didn't need. Recompiling a custom version of jQuery proved to be more difficult than I thought and I encountered problem after problem trying to cut out irrelevant files and code. In the end I decided that I would try to build something like jQuery from the ground up.
