Jörn, if everyone wrote as coherently as you babble, I think all threads
would benefit. :)

I agree that a low barrier to entry is beneficial. I remember writing my
first lines of jQuery code (back in January). From download to tutorial to
production-ready functionality, it was about 1hr... for something I though
would take an afternoon or longer. ... talk about low barriers.

I hope folks are lurking on this thread and thinking about how (and
encouraged) to play nicely with others... even if we don't force them too.
jQuery is as much about simplicity of code as it is about community.

Brian.

On 3/27/07, Jörn Zaefferer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Brian Cherne schrieb:
> On 3/26/07, *Jörn Zaefferer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>>
> wrote:
>
>     Unfortuanetely, Javadoc is a bit limited for documenting jQuery
>     plugins.
>     For example, most plugins offer "options", that is, they accept a
>     object
>     whose properties are used to override any set defaults. How do you
>     document all these options via Javadoc?
>
>
> That is a very good question and a serious limitation. Do you think no
> standard is better than an incomplete standard? Maybe someone should
> come up with jQueryDoc ;-)
We are pretty close to scriptdoc, but not the same. I wonder if John
could move the efforts around scriptdoc to the jQuery community, that
could help alot to bring both forward.
> And back to Howard's initial message: Is there a standard for plug-ins
> to follow?
I've read a lot of plugin code since I came to jQuery, and wrote some
parts of the current plugin authoring guide. That was more an approach
to document standards, instead of actually standarizing anything. Of
course those change pretty fast, and currently I consider the guide to
be out of date on several parts. Mainly because my own coding style
changed a lot, as you can observe by comparing my tooltip plugin and the
accordion or the treeview ;)

There is one important convention that every plugin should, maybe even
must stick to: Provide sensible defaults for every option, and make it
possible to customize as much as reasonable. The result is that everyone
can start using a plugin withou reading too much or any documentation at
all.
That sets the inital barrier very low, something I consider very
important. I hate having to give up using some great framework or
software just because its too hard to get it working the first time and
I lack the time to do it.
By providing lots of options, based on actual requirements or requests,
a plugin can be pushed around to do anything you like it to. After
figuring out how to use a plugin, its easy to learn how to customize it.
I'm adding additonal features to my plugins once there are one or two
requests for it, seems to work pretty well so far.

I hope that babbling about my own experiences on those could answer your
question a bit.

--
Jörn Zaefferer

http://bassistance.de


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