Good Practices

Things contained in this section are good practices for the generation of any HTML document. Specifically, this would include anything which should routinely be done in the creation of documents for the benefit of both reader and author.

Signing Documents, and Time-Stamps

It is a good idea to sign and date all documents served on the Web, so that people viewing the documents can form some impression of the authority of the document (i.e. how recent it is, and how reliable the information provider is). For example, this document has been signed.

Also, when dating a document, try to avoid ambiguous formats. For example, both the month/day/year and day/month/year format are used on the web -- so is "4/2/94" April 2 or February 4? A solution to this is to use the name of the month (or an abbreviation).

Finally, the best way to sign a document is to to include a LINK element of type "made" in your HEAD element. For example:

<HEAD>
<TITLE>This is my Title</TITLE>
<LINK REV="made" HREF="mailto:author@some.site.org">
</HEAD>

For an example, look at the HTML source of this document.

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Last modified: Dec 11, 1994

James "Eric" Tilton, HTML Guru Wannabee, jtilton@willamette.edu