OWL HOW Contribution Guidelines

Contribution Guidelines

To keep OWL HOW consistent and easy to use, contributions should stick to the following set of guidelines. The best thing to do is to use one of the existing items as a starting point.

HTML

Most importantly, contributions should be submitted as complete HTML documents. They can be done by hand or using your favourite authoring tool, as long as they stick to the rest of the guidelines. Multiple pages are OK.

Item Headings

Headings should describe, as succinctly as possible, the problem that is dealt with. Try to phrase them in terms of the desired action, for example Limiting The Amount A Window May Be Resized.

Keywords

To allow searching of the site, keywords should be provided. These are added in the form of a META HTML tag. Where synonyms (words which have the same meaning) of a word exist, provide all alternatives in the list. For example, when using the word function you might also add the keywords method and procedure. An example of a META tag is:


     <HEAD>

     <TITLE>Functions</TITLE>

     <META HTTP-EQUIV="Keywords"

           NAME="Keywords"

           CONTENT="function method procedure">

     </HEAD>

Date and Authorship

The date an item was last modified and its author(s) should be immediately below the heading.

Code Samples

Often code samples are provided to assist in an explanation. Before adding the code to the document, pass it through c2html. You can download the source to c2html from here. Note: you will have to modify the source to specify the full path to the keyword file (you can also use those provided with Borland C++). If somebody wants to change the c2html so that it looks on the path, feel free!

Fonts

The font used should be Arial or Helvetica. Usually this is added by wrapping your body text in <FONT FACE="Arial, Helvetica"> </FONT> tags. Eventually, when support is more widespread, this may be replaced with the use of stylesheets.