Language design and implementation for the domain of coding conventions

Coding conventions are lexical, syntactic or semantic restrictions enforced on top of a software language for the sake of consistency within the source base. Specifying coding conventions is currently an open problem in software language engineering, addressed in practice by resorting to natural language descriptions which complicate conformance verification. In this paper we present an endeavour to solve this problem for the case of CSS — a ubiquitous software language used for specifying appearance of hypertextual content separately from the content itself. The paper contains the results of domain analysis, a short report on an empirically obtained catalogue of 143 unique CSS coding conventions, the domain-specific ontology for the domain of detecting violations, the design of CssCoco, a language for expressing coding conventions of CSS, as well as a description of the tool we developed to detect violations of conventions specified in this DSL.

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