Site Guidelines

General Notes

  • All comments, corrections, criticisms, ideas, etc. are welcome.
  • In posts or comments: use an off-site URL to your image or video files if possible, e.g. tinypic.com or flickr.com. The maximum accepted side for images is 800 pixels.
  • Do not use offensive text, images, video, etc. in posts or comments. It will be deleted. Please focus on the topic at hand. Please report offenses to the Webmaster.

CSG Member Notes

  • Maintain a strong distinction between what is PUBLIC and what is PRIVATE to the CSG. The CSG website is not a substitute for http://groups.yahoo.com/group/swordplayguild/ message board.
  • Files
    • Files submitted for Members Only should specify author or authors, as well as date or version or both. I would like to store the latest version of a given document, as well as archive its older versions.
    • File need to be emailed or hand delivered to the Webmaster.
    • Refer to media via something like "figure 1" or "video 2" in your posts. No copyright violations please. Media submitted should include:
      • Title
      • Caption (optional)
      • Digital size (e.g. 780 KB)
      • File size.
        • # of pages for documents (e.g. 12 pages)
        • width x height for images (e.g. 800 x 600)
        • run time for video (e.g. 02:30 means 2 minutes and 30 seconds)
      • Filename
  • All posts will appear on the site homepage for a while and then archived in the Archives.
  • Review posts should include bibliographical information. Is it a book, a video, a sword, a magazine, or what? Author(s)? Translator(s)? Producers? Distributor? Publisher? Copyright year? ISBN? Price? If a serial work, is it published daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, or what?

Site Manual of Style

A short "manual of style" for the site.

  • Please don't make the site ugly by using different font families, font sizes, and colors. Bold and italics should do.
  • Scabbards are hard. Sheaths are soft.
  • Use American English over British English unless emphasizing age or the like (e.g. chain armour v tank armor), or you are British, etc.
  • Longsword instead of long sword. Similarly: sidesword; smallsword; polearm. Exceptions: arming sword.
  • Spell out City, ..., Country. Exceptions:
    • City, County, Constituent Country (either England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, or Wales), U.K. (not UK)
    • City, State (spelled out), U.S.A. (not US or USA)
  • Dates and Times
    • Dates are formatted like 01/17/2006 or January 17, 2006
      except for sorting in table where dates are formatted like 2006-01-17. (Sorry but I couldn't get approval to do ISO 8601 site-wide!)
    • Days of the week are spelled out in English (e.g. Tuesday).
    • Times are local time and formatted like 8 am or 8:30:14 PM.
    • Use superscript for centuries (e.g.15th century). FYI: The HTML is like this: 15<sup>th</sup> century.
  • UTF-8 character encoding. Much better for foreign special characters.
  • Units of measure in American followed by metric units. For example: 39 inches (99 cm).

Essential HTML

The Essential HTML pop refers here. You don't need to know HTML in order to use this site, but some of you may want to tweak you're entries a bit. The essentials of HTML are really very simple —you usually only need to know the following eight things.

1. Paragraphs

Enclose paragraphs with <p> and </p> tags. For example:

<p>This is a paragraph.</p>
<p>This is another paragraph.</p>
 This is a paragraph.

This is another paragraph.

2. Bold

Enclose bold formatting with <b> and </b> tags. For example:

This sentence has <b>some bold words</b>.
 This sentence has some bold words.

3. Italics

  Enclose italic formatting with <i> and </i> tags. For example:

Italicize works like <i>Lo Shermo</i>.
 Italicize works like Lo Shermo.

4. Superscript

Enclose superscript formatting with <sup> and </sup> tags. For example:

A 15<sup>th</sup> century sword.
 A 15th century sword.

5. Links

Enclose links with <a> and </a> tags. Use the href attribute. For example:

A link to <a href="http://www.google.com">Google</a>.
 A link to Google.

6. Lists

Enclose list items in <li> and </li> tags.

For ordered (numbered) lists, enclose the list items in <ol> and </ol> tags. For example:

<ol>
<li>Grasp sword.</li>
<li>Raise arm.</li>
<li>Swing down.</li>
</ol>
  1. Grasp sword.
  2. Raise arm.
  3. Swing down.

 

For unordered (bulleted) lists, enclose the list items in <ul> and </ul> tags. For example:

<ul>
<li>Longsword.</li>
<li>Rapier.</li>
<li>Poll axe.</li>
</ul>
  • Longsword.
  • Rapier.
  • Poll axe.

7. Special Characters

Only use regular characters outside of tags: A, B, C, ..., Z, a, b, c, ...z, 0, 1, 2, ..., 9, ?, !, @, #, $, %, ^, *, (, ), ,, and ..

Here are a special characters that must be encoded (for the sake of XHTML):

  • Less than sign   <   &lt;
  • Greater than sign   >   &gt;
  • Ampersand   &   &amp;
  • Quotation Mark   "   &quot;
  • Apostrophe   '   &apos;

Here are a few other common special characters:

  • Left single quotation   ‘   &lsquo;
  • Right single quotation   ’   &rsquo;
  • Left double quotation   “   &ldquo;
  • Right double quotation   ”   &rdquo;
  • Em dash   —   &mdash;

If you have issues with displaying fancy characters (like Ü or Ω or 武), see Charts or don't hesitate to contact the Webmaster.

Be careful of unintended special characters. For example, many systems put in "smart quotations" or "curly quotes". So instead of using a straight apostrophe (it's), a system might put in a right single quotation mark instead (it’s). Some people prefer the looks of one over the other. However, data moves into different contexts where different character sets may be used. FYI: The most common are windows-1252, iso-8859-1, x-mac-roman, ascii, and Unicode as utf-8, utf-16, or utf-32.

For example: Jane Doe put a right single quotation mark (it’s). Perhaps she thought she put in a straight apostrophe but her app "smartly" fixed it for her. Perhaps she intentionally pasted it in or did a keyboard shortcut for it (OPT+SHIFT+] in Macs and ALT+0146 on a Window numeric keypad). In any case, that character is non-existent in ascii, 146 in windows-1252, 213 in x-mac-roman, and is Unicode code point 8217 which is encoded as two bytes (\u2019) in utf-16 but as three bytes (\xe2\x80\x99) in utf-8. However those last three bytes, if not handled properly could also represent 3 different characters: ’.

This is why you see that ugly stuff like it’s all over the web! The solution, when dealing with web stuff, is to check for special characters and either revert them to plain characters or HTML encode them. So use either use a straight apostrophe in (it's), or an HTML encoded right single quotation mark (it&rsquo;ts or it&#8217; or it&#x2019;). I'm in the process of making out more code to either prevent the insertion of unintended special characters in the database or to find them and fix them automatically.

8. Images

An image is a single <img /> tag. Use the src attribute. For example:

<img src="http://i3.tinypic.com/xgd340.gif" />

The CSG logo.

If you want to hand code a right-floated image with a caption for this site, then insert code like this before a paragraph:

    <div  class="figure fright">
        <img border="0" src="http://i3.tinypic.com/xgd340.gif" />
        <br />The CSG logo.
    </div>

The CSG logo.

If you want to hand code a left-floated image with a caption for this site, then insert code like this before a paragraph:

    <div  class="figure fleft">
        <img border="0" src="http://i3.tinypic.com/xgd340.gif" />
        <br />The CSG logo.
    </div>

 

Remember:

  • If possible, use an off-site URL to your image or video files (tinypic.com, imageshack.us , putfile.com, etc.).
  • The maximum accepted side for images is 800 pixels.
  • Offensive images will be deleted.
  • If you're going to share many photos the guild, I suggest that you put them on some site (flickr.com, photos.yahoo.com, etc.) and then make an entry at the CSG site about the album and then include an URL to your album. (FYI: You can make other albums sharing all sorts of photos with all sorts of other people too!)