Coding standards

Advantage for application developers

Spoken by English male using Firefox and Firebug to show the benefits of well-authored HTML for application development.

Narrator: This is Stuart Johnston at Standard Ease. We're looking at the Standard Ease "Our Services" web page on our website.

And this page is written with some very, very light and lean HTML.

This has real benefits in production.

When good solid semantic templates are given to applications developers they understand the code by simply looking at it.

They can see the structures and they can read the comments very, very simply.

And the naming conventions within the code themselves (itself) actually gives big clues as to what the code does and that's a real benefit to application developers.

So if you look at the source of this particular page you'll find commenting that says things like:

"This branding it starts here" and this branding - you'll see that the branding "ends here".

And comments like that help developers see the chunks, pick them up and use them without thinking too much about what's inside.

And when you look at the code itself, this is the primary navigation for example, it says that primary navigation "starts here", it "ends here".

You have an encapsulating "div" that says it's all contained within this. It has a sensible name of "primary navigation".

There is a heading to say that its primary navigation for accessible devices and the primary navigation itself is simply just a list.

And all the visual complexity that you see in a page like this is all done in CSS.

So your developers will pick up the code and be able to work with it very, very simply. If they are integrating it into PHP or .net - if they have to bind it to a data source they can do so much more easily because the HTML itself is incredibly simple.

That's one of the benefits of developing with Web Standards.