List of Quality Tips
- <title>: the most important element of a quality Web page
- Donʼt use “click here” as link text
- Use standard redirects: don't break the back button!
- Use
h1for top-level heading- Use the
altattribute to describe the function of each visual- Donʼt forget to add a doctype
- Use
<link>sin your document- If You Pick One Color, Pick Them All
- Care With Font Size
- Use international date format
- GIF or PNG?
- Use headings to structure your document
- Choose URIs wisely
- Managing URIs
- Beyond Validation
- Use class with semantics in mind
- Unordered lists: more than just bullets
Tips under review or discussion
- Be careful with colours
- Make readable URIs (New proposed draft tries to incorporate the feedback received)
How to write and submit Quality Tips
All people are welcome to submit new tips for the quality tips for webmaster.
Read the quality tips already submitted. If you think that a tip is unclear and you want to change it, verify first the references in the tip itself, it could occur that this tip has been already discussed on the public-evangelist@w3.org mailing-list.
Write a draft of your quality tips using the Quality Tips Template.
When you have written a quality tip, send a mail to the public-evangelist@w3.org mailing list with the file you have created in attachment.
During the review period, a W3C QA Team member adds the tip to the list of tipss in the page Quality Tips for Webmasters as draft. The quality tip goes then through a 2 weeks review period on the mailing-list.
After the review period, the author incorporates the feedback received and sends an updated version to public-evangelist@w3.org ; the QA Team checks that the feedback was indeed incorporated and adds it the production validator
Tips on writing Tips
Start with a catchy, simple title. Whether people will read the full tip will depend on whether the title of the tip is interesting.
What's the goal of the tip? State that early. You'll need a short introduction, use it to make your point and make people want to read more.
... Before you start the bulk of the tip, remember: be short. There is a difficult balance to achieve, because you don't know which context your readers will come from, still you have to make the whole very short
The tips are supposed to be helpful bits of information, not authoritative, dry specifications. The tips should therefore suggest and justify, not slam "must"s at the reader.
"Must" can be used in a tip when quoting a normative specification. If you do, make that clear by using proper quoting markup (
<blockquote>, <q>). Rewording the normative verbiage may also be a good idea if it helps explain the concept.Making references to other documents is a good idea, if they develop the ideas of the tip, or give techniques, etc.
Put (not too many) references at the end of the tip, with a small explanation of why people should go on and read further.
If making reference to a normative specification, try to explain its acronym(s) or give its full name, with the appropriate markup if possible.
Todo
Done:
- enhance the validator's check code to select the slug from one of these tips and display it
- move the tip(s) from the other CVS repository, since the full text won't be processed by check; only a link to it will.
someday:
- context-sensitive tips: show the click-here tip if the checked content contains "click here".
- immediate feedback: rather than just a one-line blurb and a link for more, show the one-line blurb and let them choose: (a) I knew that (b) I disagree (c) tell me more...
- specific tips todo:
- various WAI quick-tips
- how to use SVG instead of GIFs-of-text
- Tips for Building a Cache-Aware Site
- GET vs POST
- tips ideas sent to www-qa
- Tips from the Style Guide for online hypertext
- general tips from Maccaws Web Standards Primer
- extract a list of slug-links from the list of tips. (probably more fun-with-XSLT. whee!)
http://whatgetsmehot.posterous.com/w3c-quality-tips List of Quality Tips : the most important element of a quality Web page Donʼt use “click here” as link text Use standard redirects: don't break the back button! Use h1 for top-level heading Use the alt attribute to describe the function of each visual Donʼt forget to add a doctyp ... Dogmeat
