RE: Encyclopedia Test Pages

On Thu, 28 Jan 1999, Tim Jones wrote:

> White page, black text. I read a lot of stuff online rather than
printing it.
> White on black is harder to read.

yep. ideally, we could just leave it to the default colours, but many
browsers uses grey as a background, which is just dumb. a bgcolor tag is
fine to fix this.

> I prefer the standard link colours (Links to pages
> that have not been seen by the user are blue; links to previously seen
pages
> are purple or red. Don't mess with these colors since the ability to
understand
> what links have been followed is one of the few navigational aides
that is
> standard in most web browsers.

an excellent point; the more our style is like normal/default style, the
more readily people will understand it.

there's a set of 'patterns', aka rules of thumb, for building websites
here that would be worth a look for an editor or two:

http://www.anamorph.com/docs/patterns/

a few ideas worth having are:

- sparing images (use an image where you actually need a picture of 
something, not just for effect)
- worksheet documents (barely-formatted pages that are kept totally
up-to-date, a bit like a log, saying what is in progress on the site)
- document format consistency (use a consistent layout throughout, to
show
that this is a single document)
- link-type distinction (didtinguish between links within the pedia and
links to external sites; perhaps include the latter in a 'references'
section in the document rather than inline in the text)
- relevant dates (all documents should state date of creation and last
modification; my proposal for versioning was a bit over the top ...)
- readable hyperlinks (ie, links are applied to descriptive text, rather
than "click here")
- document content-listing (the top of a document should have a brief
list
of the contents)
- consistent headers and footers (eg, the header says "Encyclopedia 
Galactica" and has links to the frontpage, the footer has contact info
and
local links, etc)

i think all of these are pretty obvious, really.

Tom