A recent silverorange project had us cleaning up years of archived HTML pages to be more accessible and XHTML compliant. Cleaning up what was already there was time consuming, but easy enough. The more important task is making sure things stay accessible and valid. As the client will be continuing to manage the site and create new content, we’ve prepared a style guide to help those producing new pages and editing the current pages.
The guide covers the basics of web content creation, including basic XHTML/CSS guidelines, validation, writing guidelines, and consistency.
As the concepts are likely to be common to a lot of websites, we’re making the style guide available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Feel free to use this with your clients. We would also welcome any comments or improvements.
Thanks to the New York Public Library’s online style guide for reference and inspiration.
Comments
Paul Scrivens - August 6, 2003 10:33 pm
A great resource for us budding designers. Thank you very much.
Alan - August 7, 2003 5:04 pm
Good for old fart amateur hacks with little hope of excellence as well.
chris jones - August 22, 2003 2:41 pm
Excellent. Another fine production from silverorange (we've come to expect it now I'm afraid to say). I'd change one thing though. The acronym for XHTML is defined in the document as 'XML Hypertext Markup Language', and while this is sort of true, I believe the true definition should be 'Extensible Hypertext Markup Language' (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/). Yes, I'm being picky, but it's Friday and I need something to do other than the work in front of me.
Keep up the great work. Hope the sun's shining in your beautiful city.
pete - February 6, 2004 4:54 pm
There are a few problems with the style guide. It links to this particular post, but the link is wrong. It links to:
http://labs.silverorange.com/archives/2003/august/styleguide
which gives a 404, as the page seems to be at:
http://labs.silverorange.com/archives/2003/august/genericwebstyle
Also, the page does not validate, as the info div is labelled with an id, but it appears more than once in the document, which an id can't do. (Try to validate it with the W3C HTML Validator.)
Other than that, it's a great resource! ;)
Steven Garrity - February 7, 2004 6:01 pm
Fixed and fixed, Pete. Thanks!
Kurtis Kroon - March 2, 2004 4:02 pm
There are a few typographical errors that need to be fixed:
1) In §1.2, subtopic "Use quotes for all attributes", second paragraph (after the example), reads: "The 'nowrap' attributed for ..." s/b "The 'nowrap' attribute"
2) also in §1.2, subtopic "Do not use depreciated tags" s/b "Do not use deprecated tags". This correction should also be made in the first sentence of the paragraph that follows, viz.: "Some tags that ... have been depreciated ...." s/b "Some tags that ... have been deprecated ...."
3) In §2.2, "Special Text-Formatting Classes", first paragraph, second sentence reads: "However, in certain instanced ...." s/b "However, in certain instances ...."
4) In §3.1, "Site visitors are your most important priority, first paragraph, first sentence reads: "This may seem obvious ... but it's vital important ...." s/b "This may seem obvious ... but it's vitally important ...."
5) In §3.2, "Do not specify fonts", third sentence reads: "If you want to add meaning to you text ...." s/b "If you want to add meaning to your text ...."
I have other suggestions, but these were the most egregious errors.
Other than that, the document has proven quite useful: I'm also developing a set of guidelines, and this was an excellent starting-point.
Kurtis
Daniel Burka - March 5, 2004 12:15 pm
Thanks for pointing out those errors Kurtis. The document has been updated with all of these fixed.
Kurtis Kroon - March 9, 2004 5:04 pm
Umm ... still one hanging around, listed as item 5 above. It still reads:
"If you want to add meaning to you text ..."
The last bit should read: "to your text".
Daniel Burka - March 12, 2004 11:33 am
Thanks again Kurtis. Fixed.
Jeremy White - May 24, 2005 2:05 pm
§3.1, "Site Visitors are Your Most Important Priority", fifth sentence reads "The site must me consistent.", but should read "The site must be consistent."
It's great to see such good content
Jeremy White - May 24, 2005 2:06 pm
... becoming part of the Creative Commons.
steev65 - January 6, 2009 3:13 am
A great resource for us budding designers. Thank you very much.
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steev
pingdee - March 24, 2009 2:30 pm
The link to the Generic Web Style Guide is 404 - not found ... Can you please post the correct link? Thank you!
Tony Crockford - May 29, 2009 11:23 am
I found it here: http://labs.silverorange.com/include/styleguide/
Mike Gauthier - June 9, 2009 10:18 am
pingdee, Tony, thanks. I've fixed the link in the post.