Web Design Specifications

Minimal Technical Requirements:

Design for a maximum 800 X 600 screen size (640 X 460 is the industry standard).

Use only the 216 browser-safe colors. Use hexadecimal color codes only.See Victor Engel's Browser Safe Palette.

Use white backgrounds only (no ".gifs").

Do not use frames or pop-up windows.

Do not clutter your pages with colorful backgrounds, animated .gifs, banners, blinks, counters, superfluous images, uninvited sounds, and the like.

Use an authoring tool if you wish (e.g., Dreamweaver, FrontPage), but be prepared and be able to edit to the W3C HTML/XHTML standard hands-on if necessary.

Obtain permission for any copyrighted work that you use on your web. (A copyrighted work is any original work of authorship fixed in a tangible form of expression.) Consult Rensselaer's copyright guidelines at http://j2ee.rpi.edu/dotcio/update.do?artcenterkey=41.

Design for handicap accessiblity and user/visitor accessibility generally. Use "alt" tags to describe the function of images and animations. Check for quality, accessibility, and privacy at http://webxact.watchfire.com/.

Web pages must conform to the current W3C XHTML 2.0 standard and must pass without error the W3C MarkUp Validation Service validation check for DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN.

Cascading Style Sheets must run without error in both Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher and Netscape 6.0 or higher.

JavaScript must run without error in both Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher and Netscape 4.5 or higher.

Web pages must be posted on RCS and run without error in both Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher and Netscape 4.5 or higher.