EnHacklopedia » Authoring Guidelines

Authoring Guidelines

Creative Commons License

All files (HTML, CSS, images) included in EnHacklopedia are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. All authors contributing to EnHacklopedia should be made aware of the license before contributing. If the author does not agree to the licensing, his or her contributions will not be accepted into the project.

History

  • 04-12-2007
    • Updated the Legal section to use the local copy of the Creative Commons icon. (Parasyte)
  • 04-10-2007
    • Changed footer_floating to floating_footer. (Parasyte)
  • 04-09-2007
    • Updated images subsection under Naming Conventions. (Parasyte)
    • Updated footer and XHTML. (Parasyte)
    • Changed » to » throughout the document. (Parasyte)
  • 04-08-2007
    • Added a tidbit about images under Naming Conventions. (Viper187)
    • Updated XHTML. (Viper187)
  • 04-06-2007
    • Fixed the examples in Sections and Subsections. (Parasyte)
  • 04-05-2007
    • Removed redundant Version section. (Parasyte)
    • Small spelling correction. (Parasyte)
    • Fixed logical order of history. (Parasyte)
    • Changed the page title to include the EnHacklopedia hierarchy. (Parasyte)
    • Changed the required sections to be placed into a single section and separated side-by-side into a table. (Parasyte)
    • Renamed to "Authoring Guidelines." (Parasyte)
    • Added placeholders for incomplete sections. (Parasyte)
  • 04-04-2007
    • Expanded File Names subsection to include path names. (Parasyte)
    • Added Class Names and IDs subsection under the Naming Conventions section. (Parasyte)
    • Added Sections and Subsections section. (Parasyte)
    • Added navigation header. (Parasyte)
    • Added footer contents. (Parasyte)
    • Finalized Legal section. (Parasyte)
  • 03-31-2007
    • Link to XHTML 1.1 fixed. (Parasyte)
    • Small spelling correction. (Parasyte)
  • 03-12-2007
    • Added XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.0 Compliance section. (Parasyte)
    • Additional CSS styling. (Parasyte)
    • Grammatical and spelling corrections. (Parasyte)
  • 03-11-2007
    • Initial release. (Parasyte)

Formatting

Editor Settings

Editor settings described in this section should be used to help with WYSIWYG editing for all contributors. Many text editors available are configurable enough to allow changing these settings as required, and some even default to our preferred settings. We recommend using editors with syntax highlighting to help easily catch certain mistakes during the writing process. Some editors to consider are TextPad on Windows and Smultron on Mac OS X.

Naming Conventions

XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.0 Compliance

We will be creating all of our pages with XHTML 1.1 and CSS 2.0 compliance. The only CSS allowed in the XHTML document is through the use of classes (no "style" attributes on any XHTML element). The reason for this is separation of content and style; XHTML creates the content; CSS creates the style, look, and feel. Some "presentational" elements will be allowed in the XHTML for classic (non-CSS) browsers. These elements are <h1> - <h6>, <strong>, <em>, and <table>. We consider tables to be presentational in nature, due to their objective of arranging contents in a specific manner.

XHTML

CSS

All CSS should be available in a single CSS file (no <style> tags). In some cases it may be necessary to include additional CSS classes that are only useful on one or two pages. For these cases, a new CSS file should be created with the exact page name (except the extension) of the page that uses it. Such cases should be kept to an absolute minimum. The more CSS files, the more difficult it will be to modify document styling in the later stages.

Your CSS should be written with the opening bracket directly following the class or element name (selector), followed by the semi-colon separated declarations. Every declaration must then me indented, one declaration per line, with the final declaration also having its own ending semi-colon.

Try to avoid using keywords like red or black. Use HTML hex color values instead; #FF0000 and #000000. These are much more versatile and customizable than the keywords, even if they are a little bit harder to remember. Just keep in mind that the format is #RRGGBB for Red-Green-Blue, and the higher the value, the brighter the color.

Incorrect:
body
{
color:black; background-color:white
}

Correct:
body {
	color: #000000;
	background-color: #FFFFFF;
}

Sections and Subsections

There are several sections that every document is required to have. It is up to the authors to keep these sections maintained as needed. These required sections are an addendum to the XHTML header. (See XHTML.) These sections are required to show at the top of the page in the following order.

Menus

TO DO

Tables

TO DO

Dates and Numerics

TO DO

Miscellaneous

TO DO

Linguistics

Spelling

TO DO

Punctuation

TO DO

Usage

TO DO