Code style and standards guides
Coding standards are a set of guidelines, best practices, programming styles and conventions that developers follow when writing source code for a project. Developers should follow these standards in order to, among other things:
- keep code maintainable
- keep code transparent, sane, and readable
- keep code scalable.
Where a project is governed by a style guide, this should be learned, understood, and implemented at all times; any deviation must be fully justified.
While consistency is important, equally important is knowing when to be inconsistent—sometimes the style guide just doesn’t apply.
The ground rule is simple: readability is preferential to strict adherence to rules.
Guides available
Style and standards guides are available for:
- Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), including pre-processors such as Sass
- HTML
- JavaScript, including frameworks such as jQuery
- PHP
- XML, including RSS and XSLT
- Commit messages (for version control software such as Git)
- Markdown (for writing documentation)
- Sublime Text packages (standard packages for developing the DPL).