An Tir WWW Site Policies

HTML Specification

Preface

As the An Tir site is worked on by a team rather than a single person, it is essential to have a standard method of authoring HTML, so that any person who joins the team or picks up where somebody else left off can assume the duty with a minimum of work.

In addition, following a rigorous standard for HTML makes it less likely that invalid HTML will be authored, and thus less likely that the site will display in an odd fashion on a visitor's browser.

While there is an attempt at being complete in this document, it is impossible to make a document that covers every eventuality. If in doubt, ask the team - agreements are always better than going in 3 different directions! This section could probably also use a really good logical restructuring.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Table of Contents
• File and Directory naming
• Which HTML DTD to use
• Deprecated HTML tags
• Forbidden HTML tags
• Capitalization
• Indentation
• Server Side Includes
• Images

File and Directory naming

Directories are always Initial caps, and file names are always lower case. This allows the standard UNIX ls command to sort the directories out from the files.

The top-level structure (IE: /Admin/) should never be changed without first discussing it with the other team members.

To avoid /Huge/Long/Urls/That/Go/On/forever.html (heh), subdirectories should be used only for two reasons:

• At a clear logical distinction between similar topics
• To group many similar files out of the way of other semi-related ones (as the /Admin/Policy/ directory does for /Admin/).

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Which HTML DTD to use

The DTD (Document Type Definition) used by the An Tir website is HTML 3.2, published by the W3C (see DOCTYPE at the beginning of the document source). The DOCTYPE is to be indicated on all HTML documents on the An Tir site (more on that later) - the rest of the world may have ignored the fact that HTML is actually an SGML subset, but we haven't! *cheers*

Any document that fails validation under this specification must be rewritten immediately.

In addition to using only items from the HTML 3.2 DTD, certain legal items are deprecated - meaning they may cause problems for some browsers, something we wish to avoid (see the Any Browser document for details). Those tags are listed in the deprecated tags section, along with the forbidden tags section.

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Deprecated tags

The following tags are deprecated, meaning their use is strongly discouraged.

<TABLE>

As there are still a number of browsers that do not cleanly support tables (Lynx for one), and the table-capable browsers do it in a very inconsistent fashion (from this author's experience), tables should be avoided.

<B>, <I>

For both of these the logical styles, IE: <STRONG> and <EM>, are preferred.

<FONT>

Again, not supported by all browsers, so the point is likely to be lost on some of the audience. Use <STRONG>, <EM>, or a logically placed <Hn>. Use as a pure enhancement where the loss of such won't cause a problem is OK.

<CENTER>

The proper way to do this is with a P-tag qualifier and use an encased paragraph, IE: <P ALIGN=CENTER>text</P>.

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Forbidden tags

The following tags are forbidden.

<BLINK>

Whoever developed this should be shot.

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Capitalization

In the HTML itself, all tags should be in capitals, IE: <P> instead of <p>. This is to make them more visible to people working on them.

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Indentation

HTML should indent one space per "level", with the exception of text encased in a set of paragraph tags or text that constitutes a list (definition, ordered, or unordered) item - that text should be intended the standard width of the tag (three for a <P>, four for the others). Closing tags should appear on the same line as the text they close when they encase text, but for other tags should drop "back" the indent they created. It sounds more difficult than it is - view the source of this document to see what is meant.

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Server Side Includes

To make mass-changes easier, and ensure that repetetive but needed bits of HTML are sent with each document, the server on the site has been tweaked to parse .html documents as well as .shtml documents. This allows us to use include statements in each document!

There are four required SSI statements:

<--#include virtual="/Inc/std_dtdhead.html" -->

This is the FIRST line of every document on the site, and contains the DTD, a MADE reference, and the start tags for both HTML and HEAD. Following this should be the TITLE tag.

<--#include virtual="/Inc/std_bodytag.html" -->

This terminated the header, starts the body with the appropriate background image and colors, and even includes logically linked header images (ie: the back-arrow). It also puts in the horizontal rule after the head images. This must go before the main portion of the document.

<--#set var="CR_DT" value="DD-Mmm-YYYY"-->

This sets the creation date of the document for use by the footer. Note - use a four digit year, and the month abbreviation with initial caps. This statement goes as the second-to-last line.

<--#include virtual="/Inc/std_footer.html"-->

This includes the ending bits - a return to the previous page reference, the horizontal rule, and the credits and footer images. The footer will also automagically include the last updated time, and a valid link to the page for the HTML validation service! It goes as the last line in the document.

To see a document before SSI's have been acted upon, download a text version of this document.

More information on SSI's is available from the Apache mod_include documentation.

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Images

Avoid animated gifs - they're usually just annoying.

Images should be reduced in color, if possible, such that they don't take up more than 64 unique colors per page, and ideally should be even less than that - there are a lot of 256 color displays out there still. Also, every time your image's color count goes past a power of 2, it quadruples in size. Check out the Bandwidth Conservation Society for more information and tutorials.

Every image must have an ALT tag. If the image is of no great importance, use ALT="" - that will make it not appear on a textual web browser. If the image is very important, then encase it in a link to itself.

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Kingdom of An Tir WWW site Maintained by the An Tir Webteam Page created: 03-Mar-1997 Last changed: 07-Mar-1997 20:31:33 PST

This is the recognized Web Page for the Kingdom of An Tir, of the Society for Creative Anachronism, Inc. (SCA). The maintainer of this page is the An Tir Webteam. It is not a corporate publication of the Society for Creative Anachronism, Inc. and does not delineate SCA policies. In cases of conflict with printed versions of material presented on this page or its links, the dispute will be decided in favor of the printed version.