CERN Guidelines
for
Publishing on the Web

They are the result of consultation between all the Divisional Webmasters; they incorporate the views and experience of many, and also draw on experience at other HEP laboratories.

Rather than drawing up a strict set of rules, we have preferred to indicate why Guidelines are important and why they should be respected. In the spirit of the SLAC recommendation: "Given the choice between anarchy on the Web and some form of regulation, we opt for minimal regulation."

At the same time, we have no illusion that any set of Guidelines will be followed unless such behaviour leads to some benefit for the user. These benefits we consider to be of two kinds:

• more readable material leads to increase productivity and readership,
• automatic support for some of the Guidelines (templates, utility programs, ...) increases comfort in authoring.

The present pages are both an introduction and a reference. They should be read in a particular sequence before they are taken as reference.

• the Scope indicates the limits of the Guidelines.
• the Mandate and Rationale is an important part, as it points out the reason of existence for the Guidelines and such bodies as the Divisional Webmasters group.
• a single-page Overview groups the most critical items that any author should be aware of.
• finally, details are found in the sections dealing with the specific topics. They are accessible from the Overview page.

In addition, there are references to existing templates for pages and descriptions of utilities and services at the disposal of the Web authors.

Hopefully the experienced author will find that our Guidelines correspond to his/her practice.

Scope -- Rationale -- Overview -- Templates -- Glossary -- (Hint for printing)