Style Guide

Content

Bite Size Standards covers web standards, web accessibility, and best practices for web designers and developers. We aim to provide tips, tricks, explanations, and ideas to help web developers do their job well.

Format

Articles should be short, concise, easily digestible bites. A good target is about 350 words, including code snippets. If you find that the subject needs more explanation than this, consider breaking it into two parts.

Your title should accurately describe the content of the article. There is room for humor and wittiness in the article text, but please keep the title explanatory.

A set of reference links to ideas mentioned in the article or for further reading on the subject is strongly encouraged.

Original examples created for the article and article images should be included as separate files with your submission, so that all files related to your article are hosted at BSS. Further discussion of articles on your site is fine.

Techniques and code should be tested in A-Grade browsers, and the article should clearly state any browsers which do not support it.

Markup

Articles should be marked up as valid HTML 4.01.

Headings

<h2> is reserved for article titles. Headings within the article should use <h3> through <h6>, and be written in sentence case (only the first word capitalized).

Code

Inline code examples should be marked up with <code>. Longer code snippets should be marked up with <pre><code>. We will re-wrap the code snippets if needed to fit the layout. Angle brackets within code examples and snippets and special characters must be converted to HTML entities. Please use this chart of preferred entities on A List Apart.

Images

Maximum width for images is 600px. All images should have appropriate alt text that describes the image.

Blockquotes

Correct format for blockquotes is:

<blockquote cite="http://www.whereeverthehellitcamefrom/">
<p>Quoted text goes here.</p></blockquote>
<cite>~ John Oxton</cite>

References

The reference section should use the title References, marked up as <h3>, and an unordered list for the links.

Author blurb

All new authors should submit a blurb about themselves. This should be 2-3 short paragraphs stating your background and interests, and linking to any sites you'd like to showcase.