Joe Sak

The Beauty of Standard Code

Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 | CSS, Code, Collaboration, Programming, Teamwork, Web Development, Websites, XHTML

Eric Puidokas used to be a coworker of mine, but now he works in Florida for the New York Times. While he was here, he developed a standard skin and css naming convention for us to use so we could easily jump into each others’ code when need be to fix problems or implement redesigns.

I recently had the opportunity to do just that. I had to put in a new design for a client based on roughly the same layout. Eric’s standard coding made it very simple, and a process that takes 4 to 5 hours from a blank sheet took about 1 hour with Eric’s code.

We use the same names for similar layout elements in every single web page we do. It goes kind of like this: (this list identifies common unique DIV IDs)

• Frame (main container)
• Header
• Nav (main nav bar)
• Sidebar (sub page nav bar)
• Main – or – Content
• Footer

So thanks to Eric for the great code, and let this be an encouragement to other development teams to use standard naming conventions for your CSS and HTML elements.

Download a zipped example of our standard code.

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