Styling Guidelines

Foreword

If you're writing information on this site, and you hope for it to be useful to Nylanders later, then:

• You are doing great
• That is awesome, thank you
• Don't stress about any of the details you'll find here.

Really, I've written these guidelines as if they're very strict, but if you write something down that someone else might use later, then you are winning at the wiki game. These guidelines are just here if you're inclined to sweat these sorts of details, and that makes you want a "proper style" of some sort.

This style guide is intended to be "directionally canonical." That is, if someone comes along to edit the styles on a page, then changing them to be more like what's described here is viewed as constructive, and changing them to be less like what's described here is viewed as destructive, and slightly rude I think.

Guidelines

We want our pages to be very easy to read, even on tiny screens or in low light; we also want our pages to be pretty easy to write.

• Headers, lists, and links are top-tier styling elements. When they're good, they're great. Adding them where they make sense often makes a page better. (Links are esepcially useful. They make it easy to provide context for the reader who wants it or needs it, without forcing every reader of your page to slog through that background if they're not interested. Links are awesome.)
• Emphasis with italics is fine, because this is all pretty informal writing; don't overdo it.
• Tables are helpful for structuring data shaped like a table. Don't use it for page-level formatting.

Just about every other styling option tends, over time, to make the site harder to read:

• Emphasis with bold is not nearly as good as italics; it tends to detract from all of the content around itself.
• Avoid using center, right, or justified alignment in nearly all cases. Think of them as unusual special effects, not as normal formatting.
• Avoid most other formatting: colored text, highlighted text, or strikethrough all look really "loud". 

And then, for a rather fussier thing, maintain document hierarchy. Your top-level headers should be "Large Headers." Use "Medium Headers" only for subheaders inside a section headed by a "Large Header", then use "Small Headers" only for subheaders inside a section headed by a "Medium Header", and so on. (If the header design is too big, too small, or somehow not working for us, we can change them all together, site-wide.)