HTML Standards

Your web pages should follow HTML 4.01 Transitional Standards. 

• Use style sheets.
• Do not use deprecated tags such as <font> and <center>.
• Be sure all documents are well-formed (proper nesting).
• Lowercase all elements and attributes (e.g., tags).
• Close all nonempty elements (<p> </p>).
• Quote all attributes (<p align="center">...</p>).

You can check your HTML Syntax by using the W3C's Validator. Choose iso-8859-1 (Western Europe) for the "Encoding" type.

When linking to other files in your web you can use the HTML tag:

<a href="contact.html">Contact Information</a>

If you are linking to another department's web page then use the full HTML address:

<a href="http://www.vcu.edu/department/">Department</a>

Images should be referenced by using:

<img src="image.gif" alt="Image description">

Most of the visitors to your site are probably using a dial-up connection. This means that if your web page utilizes a large amount of memory then it will taken minutes for a modem user to view your page. Many people will not wait longer than 20 or 30 seconds for a page to load.

Organizing your HTML files can make future updates and site remodeling much easier. It is good practice to place the index page and the other top level pages in the main folder. To avoid crowding, images for these pages can be placed in a sub-folder. Other individual section of the website should have their own folder with a separate image sub-folder. These folders should have descriptive names to simplify updates and navigation. Folders with too many pages in them might become hard to manage and it might be a good idea to group the files into different categories.

File names should be descriptive so that the images or web pages can be easily identified in the future. When updating the web page after a couple months you might not remember what "9834.gif" is, but if you had used the descriptive file name of "vcu_logo.gif" then you would know exactly what it was. This is also helpful if multiple people are maintaining the same website.

You can comment you HTML code by using:
     <!-- This is to provide a description of the code on the page -->

You can also use comments to break up the HTML code into sections
     <!-- Current Events Section -->  

The use of frames is discouraged because they can often lead to user confusion and maintenance problems if improperly coded. Frames should only be used when there is a logical benefit that results from their use. When frames are used the should always be no non-frames version of the page.

The simplest way to open a link in a new window is to include target="_blank" in the <a href="webpage.html"> tag.
      <a href="webpage.html" target="_blank">Some Webpage</a>

Or you can use JavaScript to open the page in a new window:
     <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="javascript">
         <!--
         window.open ('page.html')
         -->
     </SCRIPT>

If you want to customize the new window then here is the sample code with all of the different customizable options:
     <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="javascript">
         <!--
         window.open ('titlepage.html', 'newwindow', config='height=100,
         width=400, toolbar=no, menubar=no, scrollbars=no, resizable=no,
         location=no, directories=no, status=no')
         -->
     </SCRIPT>

Pop-Up windows are not permitted on the VCU Web.

Certain characters are used for coding purposes; when displaying these characters on the webpage special character coding must be used so that the browser knows not to treat the character like a coding element. When using these character codes always start the code with and Ampersand(&) and end the code with a semi-colon(;).