I run a very small team of developers on a web application, just three people (and not even full time). We're all capable developers, but we write our code in very different ways: we name similar things in different ways, we use different HTML and CSS to achieve similar outcomes. We can manage this OK because we're small, but can't help feeling it would be better to get some standards in place.
Are there any good style guides or best-practice guides for web application development that we can use to keep our code under control?
Sure, we could write them ourselves. But the reality is that with lots to do and very few staff, we're not going to bother. We need something off the shelf that we can tinker with rather than start from scratch.
What we're not looking for here is basic code formatting rules like "whether to use tabs or spaces" or "where to put line breaks" — we can control this by standardising our IDEs.
What we are looking for are rules for code and markup. For example:
- What HTML markup should be used for headers, tables, sidebars, buttons, etc.
- When to add new CSS styles, and what to name them
- When IDs should be allocated to HTML elements, and what to name them
- How Javascript functions should be declared and called
- How to pick an appropriate URL for given page or AJAX call
- When to use each HTTP method, ie POST vs GET vs PUT etc
- How to name server-side methods (Java, in our case)
- How to throw and handle errors and exceptions in a consistent way
etc, etc.
