What’s in a Guideline? Win a Copy of the Little Book of HTML/CSS Coding Guidelines!

Published on April 14, 2016 (↻ December 5, 2021), filed under (RSS feed for all categories).

Coding guidelines are important. Only one-man teams wouldn’t need them—and yet when working alone we should still look into working with some standards.

What we need to keep in mind around coding guidelines is pretty well-documented by now, and I’m very happy to point to e.g. styleguides.io or cssguidelin.es. And yet I myself had just the other month published The Little Book of HTML/CSS Coding Guidelines, which discusses the theory and practice of coding guidelines in some detail.

The cover of “The Little Book of HTML/CSS Coding Guidelines.”

Five signed editions of the physical version of the book, now, I’ll give away for free—and even throw in an extra signed copy of The Little Book of HTML/CSS Frameworks.

To win you have until April 30 to comment here or tweet (to @j9t), why you deem coding guidelines important or what you find to be the most useful coding guideline.

I’ll check the comments and tweets for all answers and semi-randomly select the five (six) winners, and announce them on a follow-up post on this site together with their responses. The winners must then please contact me through this site so that I can send them their copies (through standard mail, for which I’ll be covering for shipping fees up to $10 each). Note that I’ll bet everything on mutual trust, and that there’s no legal entitlement, claim, regress, appeal, or whatever else there is. Good luck!

By the way, the ebook versions of both books are still free, so well grab your own copy now: The Little Book of HTML/CSS Coding Guidelines, and the The Little Book of HTML/CSS Frameworks.

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About Me

Jens Oliver Meiert, on September 30, 2021.

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a frontend engineering leader and tech author/publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead for companies like Google and as an engineering manager for companies like Miro, I’m a contributor to several web standards, and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development (and engineering management), but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (Be critical, interpret charitably, and give feedback.)

Comments (Closed)

  1. On April 15, 2016, 15:37 CEST, Marcus Feinstein said:

    Always validate your code!!

  2. On April 16, 2016, 10:09 CEST, Matthias Schelling said:

    In CSS, not every property/value pair speaks for itself: think of using “overflow:auto” in order to contain the element’s floating children.

    Always write comments for these ambiguous declarations, even for those mentioned ‘one-man teams’!

  3. On April 16, 2016, 23:43 CEST, Massimo said:

    I don’t think validation is important but that commenting is.

  4. On April 18, 2016, 13:14 CEST, Shay Cojocaru said:

    Consistency among team members and keeping concerns separated.

  5. On April 21, 2016, 20:44 CEST, Anton said:

    For me the most important part of guidelines is to avoid future pain. It may be quick to bolt on thoughtless hacks here and there (getting the job done!) — until something trivial takes hours to find out “Where does it fit in this bloated mess?”

    Plus, it is truly embarrassing if I look at my own code a couple of months (years) later and can’t remember how it works or even what it does.

  6. On April 23, 2016, 12:45 CEST, chemlin said:

    Keep on writing and chugging away!

  7. On April 24, 2016, 8:39 CEST, Ernest D. said:

    Got a little spam problem here? What are all these insurance comments about.

    My favorite guideline is to indent properly.

  8. On April 28, 2016, 8:43 CEST, Martin Cook said:

    I don’t want a prize but if there’s a guideline to follow then it’s to comment. Uncommented code is the worst.