A general analysis framework is presented in this paper for many different types of finite element methods (including various discontinuous Galerkin methods). For second order elliptic equation, this framework employs $4$ different discretization variables, $u_h, bm{p}_h, check u_h$ and $check p_h$, where $u_h$ and $bm{p}_h$ are for approximation of $u$ and $bm{p}=-alpha abla u$ inside each element, and $ check u_h$ and $check p_h$ are for approximation of residual of $u$ and $bm{p} cdot bm{n}$ on the boundary of each element. The resulting 4-field discretization is proved to satisfy inf-sup conditions that are uniform with respect to all discretization and penalization parameters. As a result, most existing finite element and discontinuous Galerkin methods can be analyzed using this general framework by making appropriate choices of discretization spaces and penalization parameters.
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