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This style guide, the Developer Toolkit, and our coding standards offer tangible benefits to FAA's developers and users.

Consistency

Code consistency makes it easier to work in a collaborative environment, makes for easier future improvements, and adds stability to the code itself.

Semantics

Our guidelines mandate the use of semantic markup. Use of semantic markup simplifies code by requiring less of it, and semantic markup also works very well with page indexing for search engines. Search engines such as Google and Bing place importance on certain page content — especially <title> and <hn> elements — to accurately categorize and index web pages. By coding your content using these guidelines, your pages will rank higher on public search engines, and also within our own search engine architecture that uses Google's system.

Separation

The styles work to ensure the separation of the "presentational layer" from your content in our display files. This separation coupled with the centralized style sheet lets content code remain untouched, even when styles change site-wide. When content files require alteration, it will be because the content within them has changed; it won't be because the styles have changed.

Usage

The coding standards and styling were created to be intuitive. They should be easy to learn and immediately put to use. This style guide offers comprehensive documentation of HTML and covers the classes used in the style sheet. Our CSS styles many elements without the need for class attributes. The additional available styling is light; for example, in most cases you would need to add one class to the <table> element to change the entire look of the table.

Adopted standards

Page last modified: November 15, 2017 3:50:49 PM EST