:) I'm still not firmly on either side of that stylistic fence. I opted to do it more often on NWCUI and see how I liked it when I had to come back and change things. So far I do not like the impossibility of setting a breakpoint on a single assignment in a one-var-statement block declaration. (At least this is impossible in Chrome inspector, maybe firebug ftw?) This can be particularly annoying if an assignment in a sequence of assignments uses an antecedent variable from the sequence. But, the DRY-man in me hates typing 'var' over and over. debugability vs DRYability. my jury == still out. Thanks for the feedback.