W3C Style Guide

Introduction

You are going to write (or generate ) some online hypertext. Because hypertext is potentially unconstrained you are a little daunted. Do not be. You can write a document as simply as you like. In many ways, the simpler the better.

You will be writing a number of separate files. These files will be linked to each other, and to external documents, to make your final work.

You may think of your work as a "document", and if it were on paper, then you would call it that. In the online case though, we tend to refer to each individual file as a document. A document may correspond, in the book analogy, to a section or a subsection, or even a footnote. In this guide, we'll refer to the whole collection as a work.

The document is the unit by which information is picked up. At any one time, a document is completely loaded into the reader's computer. It is also normally the amount you edit at any one time, though with a good editor you will probably have a number of documents open at a time.

This guide has a bit on etiquette for each server , which mainly applies to the server administrator: the rest applies to anyone putting information onto any server. The section on structure discusses how you organize your material into documents. Another section discusses how to organize your material within a document .


(Up to overview , on to etiquette )
Tim BL