WISE Science Data Center Web Document Guidelines

I. Introduction

This page presents guidelines for the construction of WISE Science Data Center (WSDC) html documents. The basic format of WSDC web memos is intended to be simple and flexible enough to allow you to create web documents quickly, but also to impose enough uniformity so that it will make it relatively easy to ingest our web memos into larger documents such as the final WISE Explanatory Supplement. Remember that somebody may have to inherit everyone's documents. Who knows - it may be you! So help make this an easy task.

The link below goes to a blank html document template that has the title, header and footer elements of this page, as well as blank tables and figures, but without all of the text.

Blank Document Template

II. General Guidelines

Here are some general guidelines to follow when composing WISE web documents.

1. Make sure to give your document a running title
2. Follow the general header and footer formats shown on this page, including the WISE and IPAC logos.
3. Make sure to include a "Last Update" date in the footer, and to update this whenever you make changes. Also make sure to list the authors in the footer.
4. We don't need to be religious about section numbering schemes yet. I suggest a "I,1,a,i,..." scheme for lack of anything better now. Use something sensible that is easy to follow.
5. Make generous use of anchors in the page so that it is easy to link to subsections, paragraphs, figures, tables, etc. either within your own document or from other documents. Its easier to put them in now than having to go back and add them.
6. Follow the guidelines for tables and figures given below.
7. Please be sensible about the use of links to external documents. Web documents that contain links to hundreds of other small documents are a tangled mess. If you are linking to critical information in another of your memos, consider pulling over key facts into the document even if it means duplicating it.
8. Maintain your web pages! It is your responsibility to keep your pages up to date, and to check that links are not stale. If a document becomes obsolete, or is superseded by another document, indicate that this is the case and provide a link to the newer document. It can be confusing, misleading and downright damaging to leave obsolete web pages around. Remember, search engines will find them!
9. Keep an organized index of your WISE web documents. This will help you and other WSDC staff find your memos.

III. Tables

Tables should follow the general form illustrated below. Some guidelines:

1. Specify a simple border (border="+1")
2. Use a table caption with appropriate table number
3. Column headings should be bold, but can be aligned as you see fit.
4. Optional notes should immediately follow the table. Links from the table to the notes are helpful.

Otherwise, feel free to use background coloring in cells (e.g. headers), different fonts, fixed/variable widths as you see fit.

Table X - Short Description

Column 1	Column 2	Column 3	etc...
data	data	data	...
data	data	data	...

Notes to Table X

1. note 1
2. note 2
3. ...

IV. Figures

1. Layout - Figures should be presented in the document in a table layout, with the figure and its attendant caption below. More than one small figure or thumbnail can be displayed per row in the tables (see below), but don't get carried away.
2. Graphics Files - The graphics file for each figure should be placed in a subdirectory called "figures", and referenced in the document using the relative path (e.g. href="figures/figure_name").

3. Small Figures - If your document contains a small number of modest sized figures, then you can show them at full size, as illustrated in Figure 3, below
4. Large Figures - If your figures are large, or if your document contains a large number of figures, show thumbnails on the main document page, and link them to the full sized figure files. This is illustrated in Figures 1 and 2 below.
1. Use true scaled-down thumbnails rather than displaying the full size image with the "height" and "width" statements to speed up page loading. Readers with slow connections will thank you.
2. The thumbnails should be large enough, and of sufficient quality that the reader can get an idea of what is shown in the figure. Don't go much below a width of ~150, if possible.
3. Put the thumbnails in the "figures" subdirectory along with the full-sized graphics files.
4. Thumbnail file names should be the same as the full-size file, with and suffix ".sm". For example, for a graphic file called "myplot.gif", name the thumbnail "muplot.sm.gif".
5. Captions - Include a figure number and short caption with each figure. The figure number and caption should go on a separate table row below the figure. Do not embed Figure numbers in your graphics file. You may need to specify the width of the table or a column if your captions are long.
6. Animated Figures - If you are showing an animated figure (e.g. a whirlgif), please show a non-animated thumbnail directly in the document, and link to the full-sized animated figure, as illustrated in Figure 2 below. This is to improve loading time.

Figure 1 - Example link to a larger figure.	Figure 2 - Example link to an animated figure.

Figure 3 - Example of an embedded full-size figure.