My guidelines

[digitect mindspring com]

Thought I'd throw out my list of guidelines that I usually follow when creating a site. I think this approach provides a good balance for a general audience even though it's unsophisticated (read: simple). Return flameage as desired.


* OS platform - In terms of the final look in the browser, my biggest concern across platforms is the whole font thing between X's lack of aliasing and fonts available to each OS. Galeon (Mozilla, too?) has a zoom capability which manages size issues pretty well for me know, but can anybody think of any other important issues across platforms? I have found very minor issues between Windows and Mac, but nothing I think we should worry about. It might be good to start a checklist if you know of others.

* Bandwidth - 10 seconds at 56k, or realistically 50k per page, max. Large images should be secluded on separate pages accessible through a warning link.

* Target Browser - I know it's been said plenty, but I vote:
  - IE 4+
  - NS 4+
  - Moz M18+
  - Lynx

* Graphic file formats - PNG. Did somebody have a gripe with JPG? I find them to have much better compression for large images and would prefer them for things like screenshots in the interest of speed. No GIFs. (See Transparency below.)

* W3C language - HTML4.01 (http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/). Until we get a large enough percentage of Linux users weaned off of Netscape 4 and its pathetic style sheet support, XHTML is off limits. 

* W3C compliance - Deprecated elements and attributes in 4.01 won't be used. (Yes, this means the font tag.) Let's try to keep everything as close as we can, with the understanding that variance is ok only if it helps us to reach an audience on one of the target browsers.

* Style sheets - Use them as minimally as possible (considering Netscape 4's limitations, see: http://developer.netscape.com/support/bugs/known/css.html). If we're generating everything, I vote we use styles in the header. (But overall design needs to avoid ridiculously long lists of styles in each page. )

* Navigation - No menu graphics, but icons for section links is ok. 500 bytes v. 8 is no contest over a 56k connection. (Especially when the home page is generated every time you hit the back button.)

* Graphic color depth - 8bit. I know JPG and PNG support 24, but the file size isn't worth the added density. However, raw images can always be generated out of 24bit+ masters in a lossless image format (PNG, TIF). Just slam 24bit files down to 8 at the end. And to get good quality reduction during resizing, always reduce color depth AFTER the resize.

* PNG/GIF Transparency - None. Unless we're trying to create something more complex than we should on a volunteer budget, transparency is not worth the coordination between background colors and graphics until we get browsers that can really take advantage of it.

* Color palette - Tough one, but I vote for 24bit. The WebSafe Palette (http://www.lynda.com/hexh.html) is too limiting given that the only real difficulty with 24 is the juxtaposition of graphics and backgrounds. If we can keep them separate, 8 and 16-bit users won't notice an intolerable difference.

* Frames - none. duh.


That's enough for now.