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Styling Guidelines

Don't Worry About This Page

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 formatting.

Really, I've conjured up 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. That's the whole point.

These guidelines are just here if you're inclined to sweat these sorts of details, and if that makes you want a "proper style" of some sort. As such, this guide is intended to be directional but not prescriptive -- so, if someone edits just the styling on some page, let's view it as constructive if it brings the page closer to these guidelines, and let's view it as destructive if it takes the page further away from these guidelines.

Again, don't sweat it. The point of a page is not its styling, the point of a page is the knowledge it collects, represents, and preserves.

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.
  • Good images are typically harder than good text, so I'd never demand them or anything. But oh man they can be really useful.
    • Just drop them into the page, don't fuss about how the text flows around them or anything, you can spend hours at that stuff when you start.
  • Emphasis with italics is fine, because this is all pretty informal writing.
    • However, if you overdo emphasis, you will sound like you're pounding on the table with your mighty fists. (and, uh, this is probably not the tone you want)
  • Tables are helpful for structuring data, when the data is shaped like a table.
    • When you're putting data in a table, the simplest possible table is usually the right table.
    • When some data is sort of table-structured, but not quite? You can probably get by with a doubly-nested list. It's a little harder to read, but it's a bit easier to write, and it's a lot easier for the next editor to change it without breaking it.
    • Don't use tables for page-level formatting. It's a big time-sink to make that work, it's a huge time-sink to make that work on different screen sizes, and it probably won't survive the next person who edits it.

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.
    • I do think there are places to use bold, though. One instance is when you're trying to do some sort of "inline heading" like in the following:
      • Name Jane Smith
      • Address 3999 Nyland Way
      • Phone 555-555-5555
  • Avoid using center, right, or justified alignment in nearly all cases. Think of them as unusual special effects, not as normal formatting.
    • Yes, people make good use of center for headings in some documents. But it's really hard to do that over the whole site, consistently, when everyone is editing the site, and that's what "good use" would entail.
  • Avoid almost all other formatting: colored text, highlighted text, or strikethrough all look very loud and messy -- easily so messy that they make pages aversive to interact with. Only use them if there's a truly obvious reason why they're needed in that context. (If someone comes through and removes your colors or highlights, that means the reason you had in mind was not obvious!)
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