The core WordPress PHP files become cleaner and easier to read with every release, thanks in part to our strong standards for PHP code style. Our JavaScript, on the other hand, hasn't gotten nearly enough love. This post is intended to open up the recent discussion around JavaScript style to the greater community so we can make up for lost time.
Back in March, @tommcfarlin added a set of coding standards for JavaScript to the developer handbook. These WordPress JS coding standards were a great work-in-progress, but weren't fully comprehensive (leading to some comment threads clarifying various areas). More importantly, without any clear implementation plan the style guide failed to gain traction.
At WordCamp Boston's core contributor day I revisited this style guide with @mattwiebe and @gnarf37. We believe it is important to identify and implement conventions for JS style ASAP because syntax issues in the JS within WordPress may hide latent bugs, and inconsistent code discourages contribution. Focusing on implementation lead us to look for an existing, proven JS style guide with a .jshintrc file (a set of configuration options for the JSHint code quality tool) which we could adopt largely as-is: Getting JSHint in place lets us see the biggest issues in our JS, so we can begin tackling them incrementally (perhaps in the same manner as the inline docs effort).
After looking at Idiomatic JS and several other widely-adopted JS style guides, we feel the jQuery Foundation's jQuery Core JavaScript Style Guide guide is the closest match for what we need in WordPress.
jQuery's guide shared WordPress core's love of white space—the same "when in doubt, space it out" mantra from the existing JS style page. Moreover, jQuery's code conventions have been referenced in trac tickets as an example of how we should be writing our code. Adopting their guide wholesale capitalizes on our stylistic similarities, and will let us adopt their .jshintrc and any future code quality tools they write with minimal changes.
Adopting this guide means making two big changes to the way that we have been writing JS:
1. Strict Equality
We need to move to using === instead of ==. We've been getting away with using the double-equals in WordPress, but enforcing triple-equals ("threequals") will avoid the unpredictability of type coercion. To quote the aforementioned Idiomatic.js, evaluate for the most accurate result. It is not intuitive that "10" == 10 will be true despite the string/number type difference, and unituitive code should be avoided.
2. Consistent curly braces
Every widespread JS style guide prefers enclosing single-line statements in curly braces, and we should too. If you always use brackets, adding other statements to a block later is trivial; if they are not present, adding new statements can lead to bugs. We don't require braces for single-line conditionals in our PHP standards, but it is noted that having them "allows for fewer line edits for debugging or additional functionality later." They also make the presence of blocks more obvious, particularly when the "single-line" statement is a complex jQuery operation.
Consider:
// Two lines, one statement
if ( someString === 'desired value' )
$( '.class-name' ).show().value( someString + '!' )
.on( 'click', doSomething );
// Only three characters more, easier to "eyeball," and easier to add
// additional statements to the conditional block later on
if ( someString === 'desired value' ) {
$( '.class-name' ).show().value( someString + '!' )
.on( 'click', doSomething );
}We believe making these big changes and the other smaller consistencies found in the jQuery style guide, will improve the reliability of our JavaScript and should be integrated across the JS files in WordPress.
There are two specific areas where we plan to deviate from the jQuery Core Style Guide:
1. We will use Single Quotes for strings
jQuery's guide specifies double quotes for string declaration. The existing WordPress JS uses single quotes, and we prefer to keep this as-is: JS strings in WordPress will continue to use single quotes.
2. Iterator variables declaration
jQuery specifies that iterators should be initialized when the variable is declared, at the top of the function; this is done as a minified file size optimization, but is extremely unintuitive for inexperienced JS devs. To quote Aaron Jorbin, who raised this issue, "I would rather optimize for developer happiness." Example below.
// Confusing
var i = 0;
// A bunch of lines of other code
for ( ; i < 100; i++ ) {
// Expressions -- but how many? Where did `i` get declared, again!?
}
// Preferred / More readable
var i;
for ( i = 0; i < 100; i++ ) {
// Expressions
}@nacin has landed an adaption of jQuery's .jshintrc file in Core, and once we've gotten some comments with feedback to this post I will update the Handbook's JS standards page with examples of the jQuery conventions.
Implementing these standards will need to be done in pieces. Much of our code is pretty close, but JSHint can't even fully process some of the older files in our system due to the number of errors. We'd like to propose setting up some JSHint Compliance sprints to work through the codebase in a structured way.
Please leave a comment below if you would like to be involved in this process! Based on a quick poll of known interested parties we will be meeting in IRC tomorrow at [time]November 6, 2013 19:00 UTC[/time], where we can continue the conversation and brainstorm how best to break up the work.
If this is the case, it is not reflected on the WP PHP Coding Standards page. All code examples on said page use non-strict comparisons.