On the Nefarious Designs blog today there's a new post looking at something that can be a key in the strategy of a development group - creating a coding standard.

In my time as a web developer, I have been involved in the definition, implementation, and maintenance of several different coding standards, across various web-based languages. In my experience, this process is not as straightforward as it first seems, and can lead to a great deal of headaches if not handled in a very specific manner.

He talks about why a coding standard is even important and some of the first steps you and your team can take towards creating them. He breaks it up into a few different sections:

• Comments
• Naming conventions
• Style (ex. tabs versus spaces)
• Already accepted standards
• Expressions
• Concerns over file size