

Our Living Style Guide (Writing maintainable HTML/CSS) - mmonihan
http://info.rjmetrics.com/blog/bid/52753/Our-Living-Style-Guide-Writing-maintainable-HTML-CSS

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huckfinnaafb
Working on a project with no set style standard, this article does a good job
of voicing my frustrations. When tasked with inventing a new piece of the
software, each designer, programmer, and manager tends to disregard all
previous design decisions and create their own idea of what the project should
look like. It's resulted in a totally inconsistent look, each page only
bearing a passing semblance of the one before.

But a living style guide is worth nothing if the team members willfully choose
to ignore it and pursue their own style agendas (and they are personal
agendas, make no mistake). I've implemented some seriously ugly interfaces in
the name of consistency, and the project is better for it.

The biggest hurdle is convincing management that this new flashy module simply
does not mesh with the rest of the software. Design wants to impress,
management is impressed, off to the nerds to implement it.

~~~
mmonihan
Totally agree here. This is really more of an experiment in
self/organizational discipline more than anything else. We all talk so much
about how some new technology is going to increase productivity; sometimes it
just comes down to hacking the social dynamics of coding.

To your comment about new flashy modules that don't mesh, banks seem to be the
biggest transgressors in this area.

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5h
I'm quite sure that facebook would follow a lot of what is being advocated in
here, but then css variables get expanded etc to give them 6498 variations.

For the past 5 years or so I've had an average an average of 8 base css files
for most projects, normally along the lines of page layout / typography /
individual elements in different contexts / interactive elements & their
mobile equivalents in separate files then a separate file for each ~type~ of
content object within a page, sass gets expanded, then they get minified &
cached as one file. Along with saving a hash of their internal paths to
prevent the majority of cache misses, I've found this works well (for
javascript also) & other than hand-tweaking a couple of homepages or high
traffic landing pages haven't had to do much else.

edit: to be clear, the article is great advice but would have you end up with
a monolithic common.css, don't do that, there are better alternatives

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hkarthik
I'm a big fan of style guides, and I plan on advocating their use on any
projects that I'm a part of.

They make it easier for full stack devs like me to be productive without
having to delegate every small thing to a designer or rely on everything being
done up front.

I think others feel similarly. The proliferation of Bootstrap-powered sites
proves it.

