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I have been asked to write a standards document for work. Basically this would act as a reference-type rule book for the developers on how to properly structure, format and write the presentational layer of sites (ie html/xhtml).
I would really appreciate your suggestions, comments and input as to what should be included, highlighted and stressed. Naturally, I will make this document freely available to the WebmasterWorld members when it is completed.
I'm just starting this project now so I haven't really given a whole lot of thought to headings, but off the top of my head here are some of the things I would like to include:
I look forward to your thoughts and insights and I hope, once I am finished, I will have an informative and useful guide to share with you all.
Regards and thanks in advance,
BlobFisk
Formulating guidelines is always be determined by the limiting factors involved and the level of scalability desired. It's dealing with realistic, present day constraints in a pragmatic manner while anticipating future trends and requirements.
Some decisions are easy:
Other choices will be very easy for some, but a more difficult for others:
One thing is for certain, the future is coming... The question is: how prepared will you be to meet it?
One thing is for certain, the future is coming... The question is: how prepared will you be to meet it?
With that principle understood, then coding choices become easier. Without that principle firmly in place, people keep using html work-arounds for what really are visual rendering issues. E.g., <br> tags are not a substitute for right use of padding and margin.
The more I work on this, the more I feel we need to create css standards at the same time. I keep seeing bloated and nearly unusable css documents that include new class definitions for every little layout whim that comes along. I'm almost tempted to make one person responsible for the css documents and everyone needs to justify their requested addition to that point person.
If you really need to support it then here's my suggesion:
Do a little browser sniffing and server up a different template for it (tables etc) It's not really that hard and you'll get the best of both worlds ;)
Nick
The more I work on this, the more I feel we need to create css standards at the same time. I keep seeing bloated and nearly unusable css documents that include new class definitions for every little layout whim that comes along. I'm almost tempted to make one person responsible for the css documents and everyone needs to justify their requested addition to that point person.
In a centralized organization this is a good practice, and it can support the development of a "house style." Even in a decentralized organization, the availability of voluntary central CSS files that people can cascade under is a valuable idea. Many people unfortunately use CSS just like they used HTML, and create an ID for every element on a page and apply an individual CSS rule to each one. If you do that, you might as well go back to using FONT tags.
The W3C Core Styles project [w3.org] was an attempt to show people how to do this sort of thing. It could be instructive to tell everyone in an organization to link to one of the core styles for a week to get a feeling for how they effect pages and how a common style can be implemented across many sites.
NN6 managed to break an awful lot of browser detection scripts. Many of them were badly-written, but even those that should have worked simply didn't. Coders who wrote if(document.all) for reasons of forward compatibility still had to change all their scripts.
Recently I've just taken to using @import and making sure the document stands up well without styles. It's not pretty but you can use it...
Nick
