Better paradigms for posting JSON from a table?
$('button').click(function () {
    var row = $(this).parent().parent();



The button selector is not specific enough. To make sure that .parent().parent() will be what you think it is, and to clarify it in the code, I would recommend this way instead:

$('tr &gt; td &gt; button').click(function () {




Having the id value as the text of a td field is not great. Judging by the name "id", it sounds like technical information that shouldn't really be visible. In HTML5 you can use attributes prefixed with data- for embedding technical details invisibly inside your HTML. So I would write your rows this way:

&lt;tr data-id="goonies"&gt;
    &lt;th&gt;Goonies&lt;/th&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;
        &lt;textarea&gt;&lt;/textarea&gt;
    &lt;/td&gt;
    &lt;td&gt;
        &lt;button&gt;Save&lt;/button&gt;
    &lt;/td&gt;
&lt;/tr&gt;


And then you could get id like this:

var id = row.attr('data-id');





  Perhaps there is a better way of doing this, without pressing a button, i.e. post on textarea/row change (could be a selectbox column).


You could trigger your function on a change to the textarea, in addition to the button, for example:

function onRowChanged() {
    var row = $(this).parent().parent();
    row.css("background-color", "red");
    var id = row.attr('data-id');
    var note = row.find('textarea').val();
    var data = {
        json: JSON.stringify({
            id: id,
            note: note
        })
    };

    // ...
}
$('tr &gt; td &gt; button').click(onRowChanged);
$('tr &gt; td &gt; textarea').change(onRowChanged);





  I want less code for the JavaScript and I was thinking how much effort if would be to remove the jQuery dependency entirely.


For the record, I don't think there's anything wrong with having some JavaScript code. On the other hand, getting rid of jQuery can be a good thing, if you only need a tiny subset of its power. It's certainly possible to rewrite this small piece of code without jQuery, but I'm not very good at that myself. Instead, I can recommend zepto.js as an ultra-light jQuery replacement. You can try it in your fiddle, just change the Framework to Zepto, and make a small modification to your AJAX call:

$.ajax({
    url: "/echo/json/",
    type: "POST",
    data: data,
    contentType: "application/json",
    complete: function (d) {
        console.log(d);
        row.css("background-color", "green");
    }
});




I hope this helps, but you might want to wait for some real JavaScript experts to respond!