Signs of a poorly written jQuery plugin

This article helped me a lot. I had always thought that it had to be written as:

$(this).each(...)

Knowing that I can use:

this.each()

will allow me to simplify things a bit.

His second point, "Double jQuery" is because of inconstancy in jQuery itself. For all event callbacks 'this' is the relevant DOM node, but for plugin functions 'this' is a jQuery object. It is understandable that a plugin author would assume that it is a DOM node and since calling $(this) would just return itself they have no way of knowing. I wouldn't say it reflects on the plugin author at all.

It's important to keep in mind that these are literally what the title makes them out to be: simple signposts that indicate poor code might lie within.

I probably wouldn't immediately toss out a plugin that exhibited one or more of these signs, but I would take it as a sign that I ought to do a slightly more thorough skimming of the code before using.

It's a shame that the jQuery plugin directory doesn't make separating the good from the bad much easier.

For the inline return:

    return $(this).each(fn);

I'm actually surprised that the JS engines don't do this kind of optimization automatically.

#1. I hate the "this" keyword abuse in jQuery, this article demonstrates it clearly. #2. Some minor code style issues do not make a bad plugin.