One thing I learnt recently is that just because you can use jQuery doesn't mean the innards of your plugin should be one big chain of jQuery methods.
For example, see Scott's Overlabel blog page... Scott's original version used plain JS to do things, however it was a bit difficult to read: http://scott.sauyet.com/thoughts/archives/2007/03/31/overlabel-with-jquery/ Then Dave came along with a jQuery version of the same code which was more compact and easier to read: http://scott.sauyet.com/thoughts/archives/2007/03/31/overlabel-with-jquery/#comment-24144 Finally, Aristotle came along with a super-clean bit of JS that only used jQuery where it was absolutely necessary - this was far easier to read and as far as I can tell uses less method/function calls resulting in it also being a bit faster. http://scott.sauyet.com/thoughts/archives/2007/03/31/overlabel-with-jquery/#comment-24205 While I resisted at first, Aristotle proved to me that clean JS should be used wherever possible to aid readability of the code. He helped me kick my method chaining addiction within plugin code :) Note: Chaining is still very useful for general jQuery use, but should only be used sparingly within the plugin itself if possible. Aristotle also noted that it /might/ be better to use jQuery.fn.extend() to define functions: http://scott.sauyet.com/thoughts/archives/2007/03/31/overlabel-with-jquery/#comment-24211 The comments system on the blog allowed other people to chip in with their own ideas, eg. support for JSF forms, support for existing forms where the HTML markup could not easily be changed, etc. The discussion enabled the plugin to be quickly polished to perfection (still some final tweaks to be made, eg. returning jQuery object to allow the method to be part of a chain). Guy
