Article Submission Guidelines

The work's merit and novelty consisted, on the one hand, in its consolidating important subjects into lengthy, comprehensive treatises and, on the other, in facilitating reference by the inclusion of many shorter, dictionary-type articles on technical terms and other subjects.
-- from The Encyclopaedia Britannica's entry on the First Edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica.

New Authors

Contributions must be clearly relevant to web developers, and must not be blatant infomercials - but you are encouraged to link to relevant sites, including your own.

We will need a brief 1 -paragraph biography from you, to put in our Authors page - which is arranged by length of biography..

Article Format

Title

We prefer descriptive to cutesy - use your main keywords.

Author

Normally your initials suffice. We will link your byline to your entry in our Authors page.

Publication Date

We'll normally insert this.

Keywords

Supply up to 12 words or word pairs that would be most likely to get relevant finds from search engines.

Abstract

A short paragraph that we can adapt for the WDVL home page blurb and promotion; use appropriate keywords. It will also appear on the first page of your published article.

Content

Usually, more than 2500 words (may be less if code or other significant work is involved). We almost never count them - rather, your article should be as long or brief as needed to teach the readers effectively - avoid needless verbosity.

If you're competent at graphics feel free to supply some if they enhance the article without detracting from it, e.g. by increasing download time significantly.

We will add cross-links from words or phrase in the article to relevant other articles on WDVL (or occasionally other sites) where we feel that a reader might appreciate the opportunity to fill in their knowledge - this is, after all, the power of hypertext! Feel free to indicate useful cross-links yourself.

You are encouraged to use XMP to show example mark-up. While XMP is now obsolete, our ht pre-processor will convert it to valid HTML 4.0. Longer lines may need to be broken to prevent horizontal scrolling.

We strongly encourage the inclusion of working examples - WDVL is "The Illustrated Webmaster's Encyclopedia".

Most articles will need to be split into a few pages. We don't do this to increase page views, but to enhance its conceptual and navigational structure. Please indicate in the source where the best places for breaks would be, e.g. with syntax like <!-- Part1 --> where 'Part1' will become the file name for the broken-out page.

Resource List

Please supply a few links to WDVL or other sites for further study.

Check your facts. If your facts are wrong, our readers will know, and you will hear about it. We run our articles through a technical editing process to assure that facts are correct. However, if we find technical errors, it will make us look at the article much more closely.

Article Style

Minimal HTML 4.0

All submissions must be in valid HTML 4.0. We encourage validation using a service such as the one provided by W3C, and checking your article in multiple browsers (including WebTV if possible, and/or Lynx) on multiple platforms; please also test with image loading turned off.

Articles should be written in the minimum HTML possible unless the nature of the article requires advanced HTML to display examples of the article content.

A classic error which will cause you to 'fail' validation is putting block elements e.g. <P> inside <FONT>, i.e. you have to close the font on every paragraph. BUT you can declare a BASEFONT at the beginning and that then applies to the whole document, and if you want variations, e.g. for headings, you can do them individually.

Add ALT, HEIGHT and WIDTH to all image tags. ALT is now required by HTML 4.0 in order to validate while the HEIGHT/WIDTH allows the text to load without having to wait for your images.

We strongly prefer that you don't use an HTML editor - they generate horrible code which makes it more difficult for us to use. We prefer to work with straight text or simple HTML written by hand, rather than HTML editor output which tends to cause us problems.

Installation of New Articles

The easiest way for us to pick it up is by http, i.e. as a page or pages from your server. We generally prefer not to receive articles by email.

We will perform the necessary HTML coding to fit your article into our house style. Once that is done, it will be linked from our Editorial Calendar and you'll have the opportunity to review it before publication - let us know of any changes or improvements you'd like! You are also encouraged to do this after publication too.

A day or two before publication, the article is moved from the development directory to a directory which represents the most 'logical' place in our topic hierarchy for it (in our judgement). The resulting URL will reflect this. Later that day (or the next) we 'mirror' all new/changed pages to the public server.

Questions? Contact us.