Providing default values

It is a good practice to provide configurable items in plugin methods to enable developers to customize according to the requirements of their application. The use of an options object enables us to achieve this. A default set of options can also be provided so that developers can selectively override the configurations that they want.

In this example, let's build the plugin created in the previous recipe to provide the options object as well as provide a map of default values.

The constructs used in this example are summarized as follows:

Construct	Type	Description
$	jQuery function	This refers to the jQuery function. $ is an alias for jQuery.
$("#identifier")	jQuery selector	This selects an element based on its ID.
$(this)	jQuery object	This refers to the current jQuery object.
$.extend()	jQuery function	This merges the contents of two or more objects into the first object.
.css()	jQuery method	This gets the style property for the first...