Ecosystem Style Guide

Welcome to the style guide for the Ecosystem. Use this as a guide for adding styles to your courses.

Guidelines

Click on category headings below to access more information.

The Clean Code section includes general guidelines that are applicable course-wide. Template sections show proper code for various course features.

 

Final Ecosystem Checklist

Printable checklist

  • Inline styles (<style, <font>, etc.) have been removed

  • Extraneous <p> tags and spaces (&nbsp) have been removed

  • Headings have been reviewed, are sized appropriately, and are not styled to be bold

  • Boxes use appropriate Ecosystem templates

  • Videos use appropriate templates and each is preceded with an accessible-friendly statement like, "Please watch the following (2:31) video on Bison."

  • Bibliography text, block quotes, highlighted text, togglers, and math equations w/figure numbers use appropriate templates

Tables

  • Tables use appropriate templates for their function (“checklist table” vs. “data table top row only”)

  • All tables have captions and summaries

  • <p> tags inside tables have been removed. Use <br/> tags if you need more than one line of text

Links

  • Target=”_blank” has been eliminated where links lead to outside pages

  • Meaningful text links (Penn State Libraries) have replaced url links (http://www.libraries) and are more accessible than: click here or here or any short, single-word 

  • Broken links have been noted in the course’s corresponding spreadsheet, located in: Ecosystem Move Notes and Info

Images

  • Images are less than 700 px and don’t include unnecessary white space around the edges

  • Images (unless purely decorative) have meaningful alt tags

  • Images w/captions and credits should use the img-center div; others should use img-left or img-right

    
    			<div class="box-activity-optional">
    				<h4>Title of box</h4>
    				<p>Question1</p>
    				<p><textarea aria-hidden="true" cols="100" rows="5"></textarea></p>
    				<div aria-label="expand content" class="toggler"><em>Click for answer...</em></div>
    				<div aria-label="answer"><p>ANSWER:text</p></div>
    				
    				<p>Question2</p>
    				<p><textarea aria-hidden="true" cols="100" rows="5"></textarea></p>
    				<div aria-label="expand content" class="toggler"><em>Click for answer...</em></div>
    				<div aria-label="answer"><p>ANSWER:text</p></div>
    				 
    				<p>Question3</p>
    				<p><textarea aria-hidden="true" cols="100" rows="5"></textarea></p>
    				<div aria-label="expand content" class="toggler"><em>Click for answer...</em></div>
    				<div aria-label="answer"><p>ANSWER:text</p></div>
    			</div>