Kidlink Webguide
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The audience for this document are the Webteam members producing Kidlink World Wide Web Pages. The intent of this document is to make public the standards and guidelines to take into account when developing or translating Kidlink Web pages. This guide is for use by both the Kidlink Web Management Development Team and all those considering the development of Kidlink related Web pages to be published at http://www.kidlink.org/. If you have feedback or suggestions please send them to the Kidlink Webmaster. Please also see our Webstrategy document which outlines the philosophy behind Kidlink's Web development work.
Avoid duplication!Our web site is large, and so many things have already been described,
somewhere out there. Before describing somewhere that has been written
elsewhere, consider making a link instead. This is particularly
important when describing a service, or some technical aspect of
Kidlink. Read more... Kidlink Web Page Design Standards
We wish to encourage innovation but expect people who work on Kidlink Web pages to adhere to the following standards as much as possible. Basic uniform standard Every Kidlink Web page, should have these basic characteristics:
Images
Image/Picture Size
Information for novice Web page writersBasic HTML or Hypertext Mark-up Language is not very complicated. It should be possible to learn how to use the most common tags (commands) in a session spent experimenting with a sample page. Load a simple page (i.e. with no tables, frames or fancy mark-up) into your browser, for example try: http://www.kidlink.org/english/general/overview.html and hit 'View|source' (view page source) or 'File|page edit' on your menu bar . This should open up Windows notepad or a text editor which will allow you to view and edit the HTML source code which creates the page. Try changing some of the text, save the file then switch to your browser and hit reload. You should be able to see your changes. To learn more about basic HTML composition and how to use the various commands there are some easy to use web page authoring tutorials covering basic and advanced web page design that can be downloaded and browsed offline from: http://junior.apk.net/~jbarta/webtutor.exe. These tutorials by Joe Barta are in HTML format so you can go through them with your web browser. If you've never created a web page before, the basic tutorial will guide you gently though basics of HTML. And, if you know the basics, the advanced tutorials will show you how to add additional features to your page. Other documents that may come in handy are:
It is important to learn the basic HTML tags and how to use them. To create a simple Web page, Windows notepad is adequate, however, when you wish to start working with tables, frames and other fancy effects then an HTML editor will become very useful. Your choice of editor will depend on what is available to you but an editor will not be able to read your mind, it will be necessary for you to learn how the HTML tags work. Tips for translators of our pages
When translating the main Kidlink information pages found in http://www.kidlink.org/english/general/ please keep them simple by following a similar layout and style to the original pages. Simplicity here will ensure that our key information will reach more people, including those with slow connections, blind people using reading lists and browsers incapable of displaying graphics, frames, and Java.
For those who know how to do itPlease see the WEBTEAM links page for many useful resources. DefinitionsKidlink Web This simply means the Kidlink World Wide Web environment at www.kidlink.org, the URL being http://www.kidlink.org/. Kidlink Web Services This means all the material accessible via the Web actually located on www.kidlink.org plus resources that are directly related to Kidlink but are implemented by CGI-bin or other Internet services accessible by a web browser. Kidlink Web Server A program named 'httpd' running on the machine publicly known as http://www.kidlink.org/. Links to and from Kidlink The person responsible for the maintenance of each web page will have to ensure content and link accuracy. Their name or appropriate link must appear on each page so that the correct person may be contacted when updates and changes are necessary. Links from other sites to Kidlink are somehow inevitable but if you find out that a link makes inappropriate use of the Kidlink name please contact Odd de Presno as soon as possible.
HTML page writing guidelines
HTML scripting standard is evolving constantly, but most of this evolution is not standardised, MSIE (Microsoft Internet Explorer) and Netscape extensions may look pretty but only work with those browsers. We don't work for browsers, we work for visitors that may use other browsers. The latest universal standard for HTML scripting may be found www.w3.org the official HTML standard development group. If you wish use one of the several standard conformance checking places freely available on the Internet see the WEBTEAM links page. Remember we work for people all over the world who may be using older equipment or have low bandwidth (slow) connections to the Internet. Remember this general rule: 1 kilobyte = 1 second, so keep your page's total number of bytes under 40K to minimize download times. Many of our participants may prefer to use a character oriented browser, like Lynx. Use enough text in your page to allow images to be ignored by a text browser whilst still presenting a meaningful screen. Some people may also have disabilities, a blind person should be able to make sense of a page we write, so try to aim for 'Blind friendly HTML'. Although the above guidelines should be followed throughout our Web, we do encourage individual creativity. Therefore it is important to note that we would like to see creative uses of all browser technologies in some areas of our Web. This may include 3D virtual worlds and Web based chat forums. Remember Kidlink's reason for being is kids. Kids need to be involved as much as possible in the hands on development of our Web. Also link as much as possible to kids work, e-mails, art and music. Give credit to the kids wherever possible. When writing web pages for www.kidlink.org, make sure all links are relative. What does this mean? An absolute or 'full URL' includes the host name as in this example http://www.kidlink.org/english/general/webstrat.html. URL is a term meaning 'web address'. Absolute URLs should only be used when linking to CGI scripts or other servers. A relative or 'local URL' leaves out the host name. In the example above, this means leaving out 'http://www.kidlink.org/' thus making the URL '/english/general/webstrat.html'. On www.kidlink.org, relative URLs should always be used when linking to pages at www.kidlink.org. The advantage of using relative URLs is that a page may easily be copied (mirrored) to a directory on another server without needing the links to be change. When linking to a page in the same directory, the relative address is simply the file name (as in 'webstrat.html'). By using such links, we can move all pages in this directory to another directory without rewriting links. Example 1: The Spanish language translations of the four required files are stored in the http://www.kidlink.org/spanish/general/ directory. index.html is the entry file or 'home page' of this directory. index.html has a link to the Spanish language translation of overview.html, which is stored in the same directory. The relative URL of this file is simply 'overview.html'. The overview.html file, however, may have several links to pages that are not translated into Spanish yet. One of them may be facts.html. Since it may not been translated, we want to link visitors to the English language translation. To achieve this, we must use the relative URL to this page, which is '/english/general/facts.html'. Example 2: Nothing in front of a file name means the same directory. Linking to directories Please use a trailing slash at the end or a URL when pointing to
a directory eg: For an example of meta tags to use on Kidlink pages please look at the page source of http://www.kidlink.org/index.html <html> Generally, search engines look at the meta name='keywords' tag, the meta name='description' tag, the 'title' tag, and the content of your Web pages. To increase the chance of your page coming up high in the results of a search these five points should be considered:
Use of tables Tables are an important tool for designing the layout of
a page. They also allow us to keep text to a constant width and
will ensure that pictures will be placed where we expect them to
be.
Directory TreeIf you need a new directory please ask your directory manager to create one for you. Physical directories Refers to the actual directories on our server where Web related files are stored, starting at /usr/local/www/. For security and simplicity most people working on the Kidlink Webserver won't see the /usr/local/www prefix. For example: the path /usr/local/www/docs/english for most people will be only /docs/english. Logical directories Refers to a naming convention that can be translated by the httpd Web server program, this is what is seen by the public i.e. the logical directory www.kidlink.org/english/ actually points to the actual physical directory /usr/local/www/docs/english/
When linking to CGI scripts please use the full URL including www.kidlink.org. This way we can be sure that scripts will work from our mirror sites. The Kidlink physical directory tree
/usr/local/www/
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icons/ Image files
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cgi-bin/ CGI script and executable files
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docs/ Visitor visible files
|index.html Main entry page
|/RESPONSE/ Response files and directories
|/IRC/ IRC files and directories
|/KICAFE/ Kidcafe files and directories
|/KIDPROJ/ Kidproj files and directories
|/WWW/ WEBTEAM files and directories
|/english/ English language area
|/language/ Other language areas
| etc, etc Other area files
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Page maintained by: Stellan
Kinberg
KIDLINK
Copyright ® 2001 . All rights reserved.