The digital age is rife with complexity. How can one be expected to remember every shortcut, bit of syntax, steps in every process of every digital device and software? You can’t. So we have begun compiling a collection of Cheat Sheets from around the internet to help you (and us) out.

Web development

HTML / XHTML

CoTradeCo tips:

• Keep it clean
  Make it easier to read the source and make better web pages because of it. Choose formatting standards and stick to them. Are indents soft or hard? How many spaces for different syntax? Decide this in advance and you will be a lot happier later.
• Use a doctype
  
  This is to much to discuss here. See this doctype article at alistapart.
• Close all your tags
  
  Even tags that don’t wrap anything (img, hr, br) you should still close them to help improve rendering and even bots that are trying to read your page. Tags that don’t wrap content can be self closed (e.g. <br />).

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

CoTradeCo tips:

• Store external stylesheets in a central location
  We have a directory named “stylesheets” where all external stylesheets go. This makes referencing external images and the style sheets themselves that much simpler.
• Name ids and classes based on what they are
  It is NOT USEFUL or extensible to name ids and classes based on what they look like. Instead think in terms of being/doing. Is the “sidebar”. Is an article “callout”. Is a “product_image”. Is “boiler_plate” text/container. Is “footer_funny_text”.

General coding/programming

ASCII Character entities, symbols, codes

Regular expressions/Regex

Web coding/programming

Ruby / Ruby on Rails

All sources referenced in this article

• A List Apart
• CSS-Tricks.com
• ILoveJackDaniels
• InVisible Blog
• Jeff Hunter’s Oracle / Software Engineering Site
• jodi.org (not actually referenced but JWZ’s home page reminded me so much of this ongoing art project
• JWZ.org
• Regular-Expressions.info
• RingofSaturn Web Design Docs and Tools
• scottklarr.com
• SourceForge.net
• W3Schools