A thing that I noticed about most JavaScript frameworks is that the most common way to find/access the DOM elements is to use CSS selectors.

However this usually requires the framework to include a CSS selector parser, because they need to support selectors, that the browser natively doesn't, foremost the frameworks own proprietary extensions.

I would think that these parsers are large and slow. Wouldn't it be more efficient to have something that doesn't require a parser, such a chained method calls?

Some like:

id("example").children().class("test").hasAttribute("href")

instead of

$("#example > .test[href]")

Are there any frameworks around that do something like this? And how do they compare with jQuery and friends in regard to performance and size?

EDIT: You can consider this a theoretical discussion topic. I don't plan to use anything other than jQuery in any practical projects in near furure. I was just wondering why there aren't any other, possibly better approaches.