Style Guide

Documents contained herein specify style guidelines for documents at this site.

XHTML Documents

The majority of content on this site is published in XHTML. Such content validates against the DTD for XHTML 1.0 Strict. This facilitates transformation to other formats where necessary (e.g., XHTML Mobile Profile, when rendering documents for mobile devices).

Preprocessing Languages

Many XHTML documents contain preprocessing instructions. The preprocessor employed on this site is PHP 5.2. Site scripts provide support for entity tags, XHTML Mobile Profile, and a locally developed system for reusable bits of XHTML. Site scripts are works in progress, but the goal is to polish them enough to release to the public. One such script that made it this far is XHT, which combines entity tags and DOM to transform XHTML to HTML.

Cascading Style Sheets

XHTML is a great way to mark-up the structure of a document. Most documents on this site conform to the XHTML specification as many of them were generated with the W3C's reference implementation, Amaya. Cascading Style Sheets are used to define the presentation of these documents. This allows a consistent presentation across all documents housed at this site.

XML Style Sheets

XSL is used to define presentation for XML documents, as well as transforming them into different formats. For example, XHT transforms XHTML documents into HTML4 using an XSLT style sheet, de-xhtml.

Upcoming Projects

Several bits and pieces need to be cleaned up. First things on the list are site scripts, particularly fragment, which is responsible for allowing reuse of XHTML tidbits. The current implementation relies on specifying an absolute path or a path relative to the script's working directory. This is less than efficient when employed in files at various levels of the file hierarchy. The script should know more about the location of files containing reusable fragments. OO would be nice, too.

Next up is reorganizing the rest of the site scripts, preferably using OO code. This will requiring some changes in resources that depend on them, but there are few now, compared to the many that may exist later.