*Style guide for the Ardour manual* 1. Rationale ============ The Ardour manual should be consistent across different media, and it should be easily updatable when Ardour's behaviour changes. The markup should be semantic - looks are determined in the CSS, and only there. If you feel you must compromise the markup in order to obtain a certain look: don't do it. Accept the look. Alternatively, edit the CSS, but be careful not to make matters worse elsewhere. 1.1 visual markup ----------------- ,,, or any other purely visual elements are not used in the Ardour manual. What you really mean is an phasis or a emphasis. If you feel that some special terms should always be green and underlined, the approach of choice is this: foobar and then add .my_important_keyword { text-decoration: underline; color: #004400; background-color: #eeffee; } to apps.css. If you add a new class with semantic meaning, document it below, under "Custom classes", and be sure to explain it to the reader at _manual/01_welcome-to-ardour/02_about-ardour-documentation.html. 2. Format and Validation ======================== The Ardour manual has been converted to valid XHTML 1.0. That means it must be valid XML, with all tags closed properly. The reason for this extra complication is that XML can be more easily checked and automatically refactored than plain HTML, which eases maintenance. Watch out for the ampersand "&" and angle brackets "<" and ">". They will render your XHTML invalid, and must be replaced by their named entities "&", "<", and ">". 3. Custom classes ================= We use the class attribute for some aspects of styling (such as to float an image left or right in a text paragraph), and also for more fine-grained semantic markup than core XHTML allows. Any XHTML element can include a class attribute. If you need to add a class attribute to a word or a few words which don't have an element of their own, use foo bar. If you need to apply a class to several block-level elements such as paragraphs or lists, enclose them in a
..
. Wherever possible, create semantic classes rather than visual ones. .left: make an element float left in the surrounding paragraph. .right: make an element float right in the surrounding paragraph. .note: use for important notes that should be visually distinct from the normal text flow, or asides. Currently rendered in a gray box. .warning: use for potentially dangerous situations involving data loss, malfunction, or sound quality issues. Currently rendered in a red box. .mac, .lin, .win: use as additional classes to mark a section as relevant for these operating systems only. Check _manual/01_welcome-to-ardour/02_about-ardour-documentation.html, it serves as a style and markup guide. 4. Element use ============== 4.1 Main structural elements ----------------------------

..

A

heading is added by the Ruby framework, so it should not be used in the manual page itself. If you feel you need another

, start a new subpage. Heading levels must not be skipped. Any sub-heading must be exactly one level below its predecessor. Do not abuse headings to style a head line.

Every snippet of text should be enclosed in a block level element. The default choice is

, the plain paragraph. Cross-reference links in the manual are reasonably stable, since they are independent of the ordering number (which gets removed from the URL) and the pretty page title (the URL is created from the file name). So unless a file is renamed or moved to another sub-directory, links should be ok. 4.1 Inline markups ------------------ encloses a newly introduced term that is being explained. Use for the first occurrence of the main concept of every manual page, or the first occurrence of a new concept after a sub-heading if necessary. Keep in mind that tags might be used to generate an index of keywords - don't pollute it too much. is used to explain an abbreviation such as LADSPA. Browsers will usually pop up the definition when the user hovers over the word. On each page, use only for the first occurrence of every abbreviation. Avoid a redundant explanation in the text - the expansion can easily be extracted via CSS for printing. Use only in the text body, not in headings. is used to emphasize a word. Commonly rendered as italics. Use only if its a truly ad-hoc, one-off situation. For anything else, consider adding a new semantic markup with . is used to strongly emphasize a word. Commonly rendered in bold. See above for usage.
A line-break can sometimes be used to structure a paragraph, or to split a longish heading. Never use spurious
s at the end of paragraphs or to control the spacing of sections. If you're unhappy with those, fix the CSS (which fixes the entire manual in one go!) 4.2 Lists ---------