Some vanilla equivalents to jQuery methods.

jQuery:

var target = $('.some. classes');

JavaScript

var target = document.querySelectorAll('.some. classes');

To be precise, there are five different ways for it:

1. document.querySelectorAll(selector) -- all matching nodes
2. document.querySelector(selector) -- the first matching node
3. document.getElementById(idname) -- a single node by id
4. document.getElementsByTagName(tagname) -- all nodes by html tag
5. document.getElementsByClassName(class) -- all nodes by class

You can link those to find descendants:

var parent = document.getElementById('distinct-id');
var kids = parent.getElementsByClassName('my-class');