Making our coding standards public

For developers like ourselves at XHTMLized, code is not just a bunch of weird-looking lines which propel your website. We live in code every day. Code is art for us.

Well written code is consistent and aesthetically pleasing

Why art? Because functional and well written code is also, believe it or not, aesthetically pleasing. Even you don’t understand code, you can still tell there is some consistency, structure, flow and rhythm in well written code, just like you can recognize those attributes in a well-designed website or a nicely formatted document. Coding standards is a convention, an agreement on how to write code so these attributes are achieved. However, the main reason for adhering to coding standards is not for the sake of aesthetics itself.

What are coding standards good for?

There are several reasons why you’d want to have coding standards established in your projects. Well written code is:

• more readable
• easily maintainable
• less prone to errors
• easier to collaborate on

All these result in a more effective development in terms of time and costs.

Public coding standards

Tabs or spaces? Doesn’t matter, just don’t mix them

The first version of our coding standards was created back in 2010, in the times when developers were mostly arguing whether to use tabs. vs spaces for indentation, forgetting that it really doesn’t matter which one you use if you don’t mix them. Just create a convention – coding standards – and stick to that.

Last year we have revealed some information about our development processes and standards. Now we are releasing part of it – our coding standards – to the public under a creative common license!

The reason for this is for increased transparency to our clients, easier collaboration on the standards development and easier onboarding process for our future employees.

Releasing the standards under creative common license also means that anyone can create their own standards based on our own.

You can find the standards on our GitHub account or check these direct links below:

HTML Coding Standards

https://github.com/xhtmlized/html-coding-standards

CSS Coding Standards

https://github.com/xhtmlized/css-coding-standards

JavaScript Coding Standards

https://github.com/xhtmlized/js-coding-standards

We plan a major upgrade of our standards in the near future in relation to our other planned open source projects. Stay tune for more updates!