HEASARC Specifics

The purpose in adopting a specific style is to make all HEASARC pages uniform and professional in appearance. Although general guidelines leave much for individual interpretation, the following standards need to be considered closely:

Headers and Footers

Requirements

At the bottom of every file, just before the </body> tag, you should include the mainbuttons.html file which is in the /docs/corp/ directory. This file repeats the links in the top menu bar and link back to the HEASARC home page, a NASA requirement. In addition, you must include the corpfooter.html which is in the /docs/ directory. This file closes the tables invoked in the header file, and in some browsers your pages will be blank without it.

At the bottom of HEASARC pages it is optional to use the standard "lhea_footer" referenced from the /docs/lhea/lhea_footer.html file in an include statement.

HEASARC developers: please view (in a text editor, not your browser!) the template file on heasarcdev at /docs/template.html.

General Style/Consistency Issues

• ftp should always be lower case (ftp), rather than upper case (FTP)
• When a commas or periods follow quotation marks OF ANY KIND, they are placed INSIDE the ending quotation marks. Exclamation marks and question marks are placed OUTSIDE the ending quotation marks unless the quotation is itself a complete sentence. (i.e., What is a "weblet"? as opposed to They all cried, "Karen, what will we ever do without you?!")
• Spell out numbers one to nine, use numerals for 10 and up.
  Exceptions:
  When a sentence has a number less than 10 in a sentence with a number greater than 10, use numerals for all numbers. (i.e. There were two boys. but There were 2 boys and 24 girls.)
  
  When referring to duration (i.e., hours, days, etc.) use numerals. (I've been working on this for 3 days.)

Page author: Karen Smale