

Ask HN: How to present new code-styleguide to colleagues? - igvadaimon

Frontend department at our company is growing fast, people are working in small teams, but our CSS&#x2F;HTML is still a mess. I decided to organize a small workshop and present some basic rules: html5 elements, no greedy selectors, no ids, extensibility, flexibility and so on.<p>The question is how to enforce those rules without getting rejection and hate from other developers?
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Phosphero
Instead of enforcing them and making it a top-down decision, make it a
discussion where everyone has input. If the CSS/HTML is really a mess, then
everyone probably knows it and has to work with it every day.

See if you can come up with an estimate for how much of a time suck the bad
practices actually create, and how much extra time it would take for people to
actually do it correctly the first time. If you put it to them as "You can
spend 10 minutes now, or an hour later when you come back later and have no
idea what's going on", they'll probably be a bit more receptive.

Come in with a set of standards - then ask for objections / suggestions and
make it a collaborative effort. Be prepared to defend your choices, and allow
others to defend theirs as well.

Is there anything like checkstyle for HTML? (I work in Java, and our team uses
it to enforce style guidelines) The easier it is for people to follow the
rules, the more likely they are to actually do so.

