Style Manuals



Style Manuals One of the most thorough manuals giving information on design features of Web Pages is produced by the Yale Center for Advanced Instructional Media Yale C/AIM WWW Style Manual As it says in the introduction: "Users of multimedia computers documents don't just look at information, they interact with it in novel ways that have no precedents in paper document design. Excellence in interface design--designing how the user is able to access the information in your document--is crucial to the successful design of World Wide Web (WWW) pages and systems. Documents designed for the computer screen may contain and organize many forms of interactive media, including text, numbers, still illustrations or photographs, animations, visualizations of spatial or numeric information, and digital audiovisual material" It is clear that whilst computing skills were pre-eminent in the early days of the Internet, increasingly design skills are coming to the fore as means of communication other than text and numbers are increasingly available. Whilst we go on to give some guidelines on style, (largely relying on C/AIM), as relative novices we would not claim that we have always followed 'good practice' in our own page design! It is still early days in the development of the Web. As C/AIM states: "Gutenberg's bible of 1456 is often cited as the first modern book, yet even after the explosive growth of publishing that followed Gutenberg it took more than 100 years for page numbering, indexes, tables of contents and even title pages to become routine features of books. World Wide Web (WWW) and hypermedia documents must undergo a similar evolution and standardization of the way" Training report sheet Email address Name Have you read this page Yes No