Coding guidelines for HTML and CSS

Webmaster level: All

Great code has many attributes. It’s effective, efficient, maintainable, elegant. When working on code with many developers and teams and maybe even companies, great code needs to also be consistent and easy to understand. For that purpose there are style guides. We use style guides for a lot of languages, and our newest public style guide is the Google HTML and CSS Style Guide.

Our HTML and CSS Style Guide, just like other Google style guides, deals with a lot of formatting-related matters. It also hints at best practices so to encourage developers to go beyond indentation. Many style guide authors know the underlying motivation from the question whether to describe the code they write—or to prescribe what code they want to write. Not surprisingly then, in our HTML and CSS style guide you’ll find both (as much as you’ll still find a lot of different development styles in our not entirely small code base).

At this time we only want to introduce you to this new style guide. We hope to share more about its design decisions and future updates with you. In the meantime please share your thoughts and experiences, and as with the other style guides, feel free to use our style guide for your own projects, as you see fit.

Written by Jens O. Meiert, Senior Web Architect, Google Webmaster Team