Adopt a unified style for Flot's codebase.

[dnschnur]

Flot has had many contributions, and the code has become a mish-mash of different styles. Maintaining and contributing to the library would be easier if we adopted a unified code style. The proposed style is described in the contribution guidelines.

[markrcote]

Good idea to have a coding style, but flot's core and many of the packaged plug-ins don't use the expansive horizontal spacing of the jQuery style. I would propose we stick with the compact horizontal spacing that most files have, just so we don't make it a goal to change huge swathes of existing code.

In other words, I argue that we should continue to do

if (foo(x, y) > z) {

instead of

if ( foo( x, y ) > z ) {

Similarly I would argue against extra vertical spacing, continuing to prefer

function foo() {
    // do some stuff
    // do some more stuff
}

to

function foo() {

    // do some stuff
    // do some more stuff

}

although I see that you have already started modifying some code in that direction... in general I would like to stick with the prevalent style, even if it's not the jQuery standard, just to minimize the number of lines changed merely for stylistic reasons.

[markrcote]

I also think that the preference for 80-character lines (with which I agree) is at odds with having lots of horizontal spacing.

[dnschnur]

Right now it's mostly theoretical; I ran a test against the fillbetween plugin, but wasn't planning to do any others until after 0.8 is released. The codebase already has a lot of 'bad practice' issues - missing braces, use of == rather than === for cases other than null, etc. - that I'd really like to fix, so cleaning up style at the same time isn't such a big deal.

I do think that a common style is very valuable, and choosing the jQuery style had less to do with the actual rules than the fact that it's the most widely-adopted and familiar one. The simpler we make it - the less exceptions to the base document - the easier it is for contributors to do the right thing.

You raise a good point about the 80-character width, though, and personally I prefer the narrower horizontal spacing. So I'll add that as an exception - no extra space before or after parens and square brackets. Unless you feel strongly about it, I'd like to keep the vertical spacing, though; I've always found that a little easier to read.

What are your thoughts?

[markrcote]

Yup I agree with everything you said. I'll deal with the extra vertical spacing. :) My main concern was that changing horizontal spacing would touch many, many lines, thus confusing commit history. Vertical spacing doesn't suffer from this problem. So sounds good!