Writing HTML for RDS

There are multiple references for writing HTML, perhaps someday I'll mention them here. For now, these notes will focus on writing for www-rds, with a few general items for good measure.

If you have hyperlinks (the HREF directive) in your file, check them! Few things are more frustrating than a "dangling link."
You should have links! That's what makes the Web interesting and useful! At the least, you should have a "Back" link to an appropriate previous page, to prevent your page from becoming a dead-end.
If you have an existing text file you'd like to HTML-ify, try /usr/usc/bin/txt2html. Here's a sample of what it does, with both input and output shown.
HTML files should be RCS'd, just like any other. Comments in HTML look like this:
```

```
Currently, rcs doesn't know about HTML comments, so you'll have to run this command:
```
rcs -i -c'<!--' filename
```
Be careful about those quotes! Also, do not put a space between the "-c" and the comment string.
The standard viewer for HTML is Netscape. However, Netscape is able to do several things which other viewers cannot, such as tables and fancy text positioning. For the RDS pages, you should feel free to use Netscape-isms (the rdist page uses tables), but if you do, you should make sure that the information is available by other means. In particular, remember that people looking at these pages from home may be using Lynx or some other text-only browser. I allowed for this by creating a text version of the rdist page: While looking at the page with Netscape, I selected File -> Save As, and saved it with the Text format.

to the WWW-RDS home page.

webmaster@www-rds.usc.edu
, Last modified