# Philosophy of this style guide

This document discusses some of the principles and philosophy behind this
style guide.

## Intended purpose

This style guide codifies and records our style decisions and describes our
house style. The guide doesn't claim to be objectively correct.

This guide is *not* intended to do the following:

- Provide an industry documentation standard.
- Compete with other well-known style guides.
- Replace another style guide that you already follow.
- Provide a complete set of basic writing guidelines.
- Provide legal advice. For legal advice, consult a lawyer.

> [!NOTE]
> **Note**: Two disclaimers:
>
> - The guidance in this style guide doesn't limit the changes that Google can make to its documentation.
> - If you don't read a given guideline, then you are still responsible for behaving ethically and lawfully with regard to documentation.

## Explanation of reasons for guidelines

We generally don't explain the reasoning behind most of our guidelines. We
have a couple of reasons for that:

- Many of our decisions are driven by accessibility, localization, globalization, and ease of understanding. Giving those reasons as explanations everywhere they apply would be repetitive.
- Often, a given guideline is one good option among several; in those cases, we sometimes just chose one option for consistency.
- Too much explanation can clutter up a page. Readers most often want a brief answer to a specific question, rather than a detailed explanation.

That said, we recognize that it's sometimes useful to know why we made a
given choice, so we've started to include occasional explanations in the [What's new](https://developers.google.com/style/whats-new) page.