The web development best practice bible

Simon Willison is talking about web development best practice, of which standards are one part and information architecture another and design another and writing skills yet another. “Let’s move forward to the other pieces of the puzzle.” I’m pretty much in total agreement with this; I just have one thing to say. If and when we put together the bible of web development practice, the Wiki that defines all good techniques and methods, we should call it Principia Helvetica.

10 Responses to “The web development best practice bible”

  1. I’m all for putting together a bible of best practice, but “Principia Helvetica” flew straight over my head. It’s certainly a cool looking pair of words, but what on earth does it mean?

    Simon Willison
  2. It was a rather weak pun on the Principia Mathematica, Newton’s book which defined and revolutionised physics in the 1680s. Helvetica being a font, it seemed to fit with the notion of design and all…

    sil
  3. Your link is broken - s/bestPractise/bestPractice/ will resolve it.

    Schwuk
  4. Schwuk: fixed, cheers.
    WEirdly, I cut-and-pasted that link. I wonder if Simon subtly changed the link from American to English spelling and didn’t tell anyone? ;)

    sil
  5. Stu: if it helps, I got it and at least sniggered to myself.

    Gary Fleming
  6. Sadly, I thought of Switzerland. How about  something similar to Moxon’s Mechanick exercises on the whole art of printing, which was the world’s first printing manual (1683): Mechanick exercises on the whole art of Web development? Not as snappy I’ll admit.

    Tom
  7. The Compleat Web Developer?
    Should that be “Webb”?

    The Decline and Fall of the Netscape Empire?

    Quis custodiet ipsos web developers? Ahahaha :)

    sil
  8. “I wonder if Simon subtly changed the link from American to English spelling and didn’t tell anyone?”

    Dammit, I was hoping no one would notice! I checked my referers before changing the link and didn’t see any incoming hits to that page so I assumed no one had linked to it yet. Of course, if you’re reading through an aggregator and grabbed my feed in the 45 minutes in which the link was spelt wrong you’d have got the entry with the bad permalink.

    For the record, “best practice” is the correct English spelling (I debated this on IRC last night). In English, practise is a verb and practice a noun. In the context of “Best practice” it’s a noun, so you spell it with a ‘c’ instead.

    I wish I’d known that before blowing $35 on bestpractise.net and bestpractise.org :(

    Simon Willison
  9. Sorry, dude, I shouldn’t have outed you as a man coming under the malign influence of all the bad spellers around you in America. :)
    The domain names should be OK — statistically more participants will be American or speak American English anyway. Might not hurt to get the other two as well, although that’s a $70 outlay in total — hassle Adrian for a pay rise or something? :)

    sil
  10. The other two aren’t available, or I’d snap them up in a shot.

    Simon Willison

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