Standards for Web Programming

Question

This is strictly an opinion/experience question for research purposes.

I was wondering what coding standards companies have in place now for Web Developers? (Document formats, coding standards, file structures, etc.)

Obviously they all can't be listed, but some major ones would give me an idea.

Answer 1

The World Wide Web Consortium is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web.

Answer 2

I hope that company coding standards for Web Developers include W3C standards, but commercial pressures will tend to encourage whatever solution gets the job done.

I would love to be proved wrong in this regard.

Answer 3

At the previous company I worked for, there were three main standards that were to adhered to for front-end work:

1. All HTML would adhere to the HTML 4.01 Strict standards, with the following exceptions:

   • iframes were to be allowed due to advertising.
   • The start attribute was to be allowed within lists.
   • target="_top" was allowed to be used for framebreaking purposes.

   These exceptions were codified into a custom doctype document, which is documented here. All work produced was expected to validate against this doctype.

2. All CSS would validate against the CSS 2.1 standard, with the exception that the * and _ prefix hacks were allowed to be used.

3. All JavaScript was expected to pass through JSLint without issue (strict whitespace was absolutely not turned on).

We also ran regular code reviews with the expectation that these would allow us to pull out the good work done by our developers and codify this into best practice.

Answer 4

The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is something to be considered as well by any serious web developer: http://www.w3.org/WAI/