Design and formatting guidelines used for my site

Not everything is consistent because some of these guidelines have evolved and I've been too lazy to write a script to change everything. The site is designed to load fast, is extensively hyperlinked, is minimalistic, and provides for easy reading and navigation, no matter what kind of browser you use (from the latest version of Netscape to Lynx to a speech-only browser).


Titles of music albums and songs, articles, movies, books, comics, and TV shows are all italicised when used as part of continuous text. Exceptions are when they're used in headers, or in an itemised list by themselves. Words in titles are generally capitalised except for certain un-important words. Words in article titles are not capitalised except for important words.

Document (file) naming is irrelevant though a logical name should be provided when possible. Titles will be consistent with the intent of the originator of the title. For example, The Residents will not be referred to as "Residents".

Signatures include a link back to the main theme page. If users want to go back to the page they were last at, they can use the back button. This will be followed by the home page and the e-mail address, and one or more dates. Signature files will be mainted using Server Side Includes (SSI).

Except in cases where credit is given to others, everything authored by me will just have a link back to the home page at the bottom. In general, a separate credits page will be maintained for any endeavour.

When linking to non-site pages, have a separate link. This makes checking for broken links easy. An adaptive system is used for checking broken links: whenever a new link is added to a list, the links before and after it in the list are checked (and removed if broken).

Multiple links for a certain item (such as ones in a bulleted list) will be given by asterixes (*).

When considering different aspects of the same theme, for example sequels of a movie, they will all be in the same HTML document.

Headings (<hN> tags) will be increased (decreased) in level (N) based upon degree of importance of the heading.

Use the guidelines in my Good design vs. Bad design on the web essay.

In general, the point is to have fun, so some inconsistencies will be encouraged!


Ram Samudrala || me@ram.org