The following document is a style guide for producing content for the CLASP: CUNY League of Active Speech Professors Web site. This document outlines basic principles for adding content to the site, defines the basic style sheet classes available to content managers and how they should be used, and defines principles, guidelines, and best practices for content.
This sections details the minimum coding standards required by the CLASP site.
This site is designed to the XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS2.1 specifications as laid down by the WC3 (World Wide Web Consortium). All new and existing pages must aim to validate against these specifications.
In order to conform to XHTML 1.0 Strict, every (X)HTML page on the site must start with the following DOCTYPE declaration.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">This site aims to meet Double-A accessibility conformance as outlined in WCAG 1.0 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0).
The following table outlines browser support requirements for this site.
| Browser Family | Support Level |
| IE 6+ | Target |
| Firefox 1.x | Target |
| Safari 2.x | Target |
| Opera 8.x | Supported |
| IE 5.5 | Supported |
| Netscape 6 | Supported |
| IE5.x/Mac | Partially Supported |
| IE 5.0 | Partially Supported |
| Opera 5.0-7.x | Partially Supported |
| IE 4.0 | Partially Supported |
| NN 4.0 | Partially Supported |
| IE4.0/Mac | Unsupported |
All pages should use the Unicode UTF-8 character set.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />All special characters should be marked up using the correct named entity or Unicode equivalent in order for the page to display correctly across browsers and to validate. In particular, use the following codes for common special characters:
| Name | Symbol | Code |
| Ampersand | & | & |
| Left Double Quote | “ | “ |
| Right Double Quote | ” | ” |
| Less Than | < | < |
| Greater Than | > | > |
| en-dash | – | &endash; |
| em-dash | — | &emdash; |
| Ellipsis | … | … |
Take special care when inputting content created in a word processor.
To encourage ease of navigation and good search engine ranking, all pages should contain a title, description and keywords. These content elements should be created by the content editor and not left to the developer.
Page title should be simple, descriptive and distinct, avoiding marketing hyperbole. For consistency, all titles should be in the format:
<title>[Page] // CLASP // CUNY League of Active Speech Professors</title>Alternative text is required for every image element on the site. Alt text must provide an adequate description of the content or function of the image. Alternative text is content and must be created by the content editor. It must not be left for the web developer to decide.
Page title should be simple, descriptive and distinct, avoiding marketing hyperbole. For consistency, all titles should be in the format:
<img src="/img/xxxx.jpg" alt="Add image description text here." width="#" height="#" />If the image is purely decorative, the alt text can be left blank.
<img src="/img/decor.gif" alt="" width="#" height="#" />The text within links should be unique and describe the destination of the link. Links saying "Click Here" or "More" should be avoided.
Page title should be simple, descriptive and distinct, avoiding marketing hyperbole. For consistency, all titles should be in the format:
<a href="register.html">Click here to Register</a>You can provide additional, non-critical link information in the form of a tool-tip by adding a title attribute.
<a href="register.html" title="Register for the Colloquium">Click here to Register</a>All pages should be coded using meaningful rather than presentational XHTML. Meaningful elements include, but are not limited to, the following:
Deprecated elements and attributes should be avoided.
Abbreviations and acronyms should be marked up and defined the first time they appear on each page.
<abbr title="NY">New York</abbr><acronym title="CLASP">CUNY League of Active League Professors</acronym>Tables are reserved for data and should not be used for page layout. Data tables should be marked up using appropriate meaningful elements such as; <th>, <td>, <thead>, <tbody> and <tfoot> and appropriate meaningful attributes such as; summary, id and headers.
This document contains useful resources for the site such as links and descriptions of all the XHTML and CSS files used, links to templates and further coding resources.
All the pages on the site can be made up from these core XHTML templates.
All the pages on the site can be made up from this core CSS file.
The lightbox gallery source files can be found here: