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