Tips for Academic Online Publishing

Foreword

The following tips are the principles I have come to follow in maintaining this website after years of trials and errors. They might be of some help to individuals who publish material of academic nature online.

Authoring: General

Separate the content and the presentation of web documents.
Remember that HTML/XHTML is meant to mark up the logical structure of web documents.
Use CSS to control the physical layout of web documents.
Consider migrating from HTML to XHTML as the bridge to the promising world of XML.
Don't rely too much on yourself, and validate the HTML/XHTML and CSS of your web documents using the following services to avoid grammatical mistakes:
- HTML/XHTML: W3C MarkUp Validation Service / WDG HTML Validator
- CSS: W3C CSS Validation Service / WDG CSS Check
Remember that the majority of the so-called WYSIWYG editors can easily mess up the source codes of your web documents.
Consider boycotting GIF and switching to PNG.

Authoring: HTML/XHTML

Organize the structure of the content logically, and mark up its parts accordingly using logical markup elements.
Avoid using physical layout elements (e.g., center, font, etc.) and attributes (e.g., align, background, bgcolor, color, etc.).
Avoid using tables for layout purposes.
Choose a self-contained title for each webpage for the title element, e.g.: Welcome to Blah-Blah-Blah's Website instead of Welcome to My Website.
Insert a meta declaration inside the head element to indicate the character encoding, e.g.:
- HTML: <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
- XHTML: <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=UTF-8" />
Sign each webpage with its URI, your name and email address, and date of last modification, preferably using the address element.

Authoring: CSS

Make no assumption about the screen size of potential visitors.
Use relative units (e.g., %, em, etc.) instead of absolute ones (e.g., pt, px, etc.).
Specify the background property together with the color property.
Prepare a separate style sheet for the print media.

Design and Usability

Less is more.
Avoid relying on JavaScript, ActiveX and, worst of all, Flash as the sole means of navigation; they make your website really suck, especially if used on the start page.
Avoid overusing dynamic content with the proprietary blink element, animated GIF, JavaScript, ActiveX and, worst of all, Flash; they tire and sometimes even nauseate visitors.
Avoid fancy formatting like the overuse of images; it makes your website look cheap.
Avoid frames whenever possible; prepare alternate content using the noframes element.
Prepare alternate content to the one with the script element using the noscript element.
Add alternate texts to images using the alt attribute.
Avoid using a background image where there are a large amount of texts.
Make the color contrast between the background and the texts sharp enough; the color combination that is the easiest to read is black (or navy) on white (or off-white).
Use relative URIs for navigation inside your website.
Put a navigation link to its parent page on each webpage.
Avoid referring to hyperlinks with expressions like "Click here"; make them part of the natural flow of text.
Add character-based alternates to image-based navigational links.
Sans-serif fonts such as Arial, Verdana and Tahoma are easier to read on the screen than serif fonts such as Times New Roman.
Avoid using PDF for online reading; use it solely for later offline printing.
Make no redundant entrance page to reach the true start page.
Make the start page as concise as possible; avoid putting there huge images, audio, video or other files requiring the use of proprietary plug-ins.
Minimize the change of the URIs of your webpages.

Content Syndication

Syndicate your website.