Advantages of Using a Style Guide

The essence of developing a style guide is that it enables you to set the required properties just ONCE rather than having to apply them manually to each and every window (and to each and every control in those windows). The advantages of such a "single point of definition" are:

•All defined settings are inherited automatically (resulting in fewer settings, hence in less work).

•The fewer settings there are, the easier they are to maintain (again less work).

•The fewer settings there are, the smaller the ESI file will be, and the better your application will perform.

Furthermore, complying with a style guide ensures that windows/dialogs developed by different developers nevertheless have the same look and feel (like corporate "house styles" for paper documents). This not only greatly helps the end users, but also prevents individual developers from having to reinvent the wheel all the time. Finally, style guides are easy to implement across applications, again facilitating ease-of-use.