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6. Standards

By following these guidelines, Web content providers can save themselves and the Web Team a lot of extra work.


Part 1: File Names and Extensions



Note: Absolutely NO file or folder name should include forward or backward slashes ( \ ) ( / ). Using either in your file/folder name can cause extreme difficulty, as some operating systems will allow you to use these characters, while others will not. UNIX, which is the operating system of our Web server, WILL NOT ALLOW the use of these characters.

 

 

 



HTML documents

These are Web pages. Some Web editing programs use .htm by default, some use .html. The Web Team feels that consistency with regard to this is semi-important as we look at implementing a system to manage our Web files. We plan to standardize on .html, therefore it may behoove you to use .html whether you’re using a text editor, Dreamweaver, or any other software to create your Web pages.

Naming these Web files is very important. When you are naming your Web pages, please try to use only lowercase letters, numbers, dashes (-), and underscores ( _ ) if at all possible. Using capital letters, other characters, and spaces just complicates things by increasing the potential for user error in typing in your Web address. Also, do attempt to keep your page names as short as possible; there are a fairly large number of Web pages already on the server that cannot be properly handled by some software programs because of the length of their file names.


Word and Acrobat documents

These are formatted text files that one would normally have available as a download from a Web page. They can theoretically be named whatever you wish, but it wouldn’t hurt to follow the guidelines above.


Image files

Image files are pictures, icons and the like that add color, motion, warmth and depth to your site. There are far too many image file types to cover them all, and many are not really suitable for the Web. The Web Team uses primarily .jpg and .gif image files because of their size and compatibility.