A consistent use of style across the site is essential for the maintenance of a professional organizational identity and to establish a uniform user interface that supports efficiency of use and concise text. This document focuses on the most important rules to ensure these goals.

**Style Guidelines**

- **Titles:** The title of a node should be in title case: capitalization of all words, except for internal articles, prepositions, conjunctions and "of", "to", and "be". For example:

> *The Vitamins are in My Fresh Brussels Sprouts*

Exceptions are allowed for the content types blog entry, store, case, comment titles and forum topics, and informal content such as tutorials and stories, which should use sentence case: capitalization of the first letter and names of persons, places or things only. For example:

> *The vitamins are in my fresh Brussels sprouts*

A further exception is allowed for names of specific entities which are case-sensitive in nature, for example program modules.

Words in all capital letters are never allowed except for acronyms.

- **Descriptive Content:**
- Documentation and descriptive text should be rendered in a neutral point of view without the insertion of personal commentary, opinions, or use of the first person narrative. Exceptions are allowed for nodes which are primarily intended for commentary such as blog nodes and support cases.
- Assertions of non-obvious facts should, whenever possible, be annotated with references.
- A best effort should be made at all times to ensure that correct spelling and grammar are observed.
- Avoid redundancy:
- Make links to high quality content maintained by other parties when possible
- Do not re-document things that are already documented elsewhere.

- **Formatting:** Users endowed with the role "content editor" or higher must make the necessary investment to learn how to format text cleanly for display in the Drupal system. The "Simple Text" or Markdown format is recommended and is the default input format. The user should know how to write italics, bold, headings, lists, hyper-links to internal and external resources, quotations, citations, tables, embedded images and page-breaks.

- **User Names:** A full name is required for every user account. A single space should separate first from last name. The name must be capitalized appropriately (MLA style for personal name). Handles and nicknames are not allowed.

- **Use of Comments on Nodes:** Comments are attached to nodes and therefore are viewed as modifiers to the main content. A good comment provides additional information which is both relevant and necessary. Comments should not be used to report problems or ask for help -- that is the function of the case tracking system. Comments not meeting this criteria may be deleted at the discretion of the site administrators.

**File Formats**

- **Image formats:** The [w:PNG] format is preferred for images of a non-photographic nature (e.g. line drawing, screenshots, etc). The [w:JPEG] format is preferred for photographic content and should have a compression quality of at least 85%.
- **Video formats:** The preferred video format is a Quicktime movie using [w:H264] codec. Videos should be exported into a web-friendly size using moderate compression and a resolution of not more than 640x480.
- **Audio formats:** To be determined.
- **Document Attachments:** Documents should be in PDF format unless user-editability is specifically required, e.g. document templates, spreadsheets, etc.
- **Archive Attachments:** .zip is the preferred archive format. .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 are acceptable for technical audiences only. .sit, .rar and others should be avoided.

**Naming Conventions**

The following conventions shall be applied to the creation of new nodes, in addition to the formatting guidelines outlined above for titles:

- Avoid non-alphanumeric characters in titles; e.g. !@#$% etc.
- Avoid Redundancy:
- Do not reference the type of content of the node in the title. For example. "Sensor blog entry" is a redundant title for a blog entry node.
- For sub-categories and sub-pages of a book do not reference the title of the parent in the title of the child. For example "Recording Project" as a sub category of "Projects" is redundant since all children of Projects are by definition Projects.
- Descriptive text such as captions or sub-titles should be placed in the body of the node or under the "Description" entry of a category (see Category Information tab in the node edit page).
- Node titles should be entered into the Title field but should not be repeated in the body of the node, except in certain special cases where it may be warranted (e.g. cover pages in books).
- For events which recur on an annual or semi-annual basis, the year should appear *after* the main part of the title. For example, "Open Sound Control Conference 2004".

**Category Conventions**

To be written. Topics:

- Policy on relation between parent and child categories.
- Node tagging.

**Links to External Resources**

To be written. Topics:

- Link formatting
- Link depth
- When to use each type:
- Related Links
- Weblink nodes
- Links embedded in content