Style Guidance
By Michael Sauers
Print publishers have long relied on in-house style guides for establishing textual coherence and a standardized appearance in their publications. A style guide is an invaluable resource for your staff, whether you're publishing on paper or online, but many Web teams don't recognize the importance of assembling one.
As you know, HTML lends itself to shortcuts. Some authors omit paragraph tags, while others put them in. Some authors stick to the specifications, others bend the rules—sometimes to the breaking point—as long as a page looks right on the screen. You can standardize your markup procedures by assembling a style manual, thereby reducing possible browser compatibility errors.
My company, the Bibliographical Center for Research (BCR), addressed some of the behind-the-scenes shortcomings of its site during a recent redesign, specifically the lack of a consistent design among pages and the clarity of the HTML markup. Each of the eight HTML authors had their own quirks about how they coded pages, and were using at least four different software packages among them. We decided to standardize the site design by using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and now all of us use the same HTML package, HTML-Kit from the W3C. (The decision to go with HTML-Kit was based on its features, including a built-in FTP client and code validation.) Once we made those decisions, we had to convert nearly 1000 pages from our old format to the new design. To minimize conversion problems, we created a style manual for our Web site.
Consistency
Although our Internet committee had agreed on a set of design standards for previous versions of the site, nothing had ever been put in writing.
