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<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../../boost.css">
<title>Writing Documentation for Boost - HTML Design</title>
</head>
<body link="#0000ff" vlink="#800080">
<table border="0" cellpadding="7" cellspacing="0" width="100%" summary=
"header">
<tr>
<td valign="top" width="300">
<h3><a href="index.html"><img height="86" width="277" alt="C++ Boost" src="../../c++boost.gif" border="0"></a></h3>
</td>
<td valign="top">
<h1 align="center">Writing Documentation for Boost</h1>
<h2 align="center">HTML Design</h2>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<hr>
<dl class="page-index">
<dt><a href="#introduction">Introduction</a></dt>
<dt><a href="#common-pages">Common Pages Included in HTML Documentation</a></dt>
<dl class="page-index">
<dt><a href="#index-page">Index</a></dt>
<dt><a href="#overview-page">Overview</a></dt>
<dt><a href="#definitions-page">Definitions</a></dt>
<dt><a href="#rationale-page">Rationale</a></dt>
<dt><a href="#configuration-page">Configuration Information</a></dt>
<dt><a href="#faq-page">Frequently Asked Questions</a></dt>
<dt><a href="#bibliography-page">Bibliography</a></dt>
<dt><a href="#acknowledgements-page">Acknowledgment</a></dt>
<dt><a href="#header-page">Header Reference</a></dt>
</dl>
<dt><a href="#layout">Layout</a></dt>
<dl class="page-index">
<dt><a href="#page-banner">Page Banner</a></dt>
<dt><a href="#page-index">Page Index</a></dt>
<dt><a href="#content">Documentation Content</a></dt>
<dl class="page-index">
<dt><a href="#doc-footnotes">Footnotes</a></dt>
</dl>
<dt><a href="#revision-info">Revision Information</a></dt>
<dt><a href="#copyright">Copyright Information</a></dt>
</dl>
<dt><a href="#format">Format</a></dt>
<dl class="page-index">
<dt><a href="#style-sheets">Cascading Style Sheets</a></dt>
<dl class="page-index">
<dt><a href="#boost-style-sheet">Boost Style Sheet</a></dt>
</dl>
</dl>
<dt><a href="#templates">Templates</a></dt>
<dl class="page-index">
<dt><a href="#index-template">Index Page Template</a></dt>
<dt><a href="#overview-template">Overview Page Template</a></dt>
<dt><a href="#definitions-template">Definitions Page Template</a></dt>
<dt><a href="#rationale-template">Rationale Page Template</a></dt>
<dt><a href="#configuration-template">Configuration Page Template</a></dt>
<dt><a href="#faq-template">FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) Page Template</a></dt>
<dt><a href="#bibliography-template">Bibliography Page Template</a></dt>
<dt><a href="#acknowledgements-template">Acknowledgments Page Template</a></dt>
<dt><a href="#header-template">Header Page Template</a></dt>
</dl>
</dl>
<h2><a name="introduction"></a>Introduction</h2>
<p>Boost places no requirements on the design of HTML documentation for library
submitters. If you are submitting a library for which documentation already
exists in either HTML or in a form easily converted to HTML then there is no
need for you to read this document. However, if you have not yet written the
documentation, or if you expect to have to translate documentation written in
a format not easily convertible to HTML then this document can give you a lot
of information on how to go about writing documentation in HTML.</p>
<p>In several places this document assumes you're writing the documentation to
conform to the structure described in the <a href="structure.html">Documentation
Structure</a> document. There is no requirement that your documentation content
follow these guidelines, but they provide an effective way to communicate technical
specifications for a library in a terse yet precise manner that's familiar to
many Boost users.</p>
<p>This document also contains links to <a href="#templates">HTML template files</a>
that can be used to rapidly develop documentation for a library submission.
These templates follow the guidelines presented here and in the <a href="structure.html">Documentation
Structure</a> document.</p>
<h2><a name="common-pages"></a>Common Pages Included in HTML Documentation</h2>
<p>Most HTML documentation projects will contain some common pages. General guidelines
for these common pages are provided below.</p>
<h3><a name="index-page"></a>Index</h3>
<p>The index page is the first page presented to a user when he browses the documentation.
Generally this page should not contain any actual content, but instead contains
a list of links to specific content. At a minimum this list should contain a
link to every HTML page contained in the documentation. Optionally, sub-lists
may be provided for individual pages linking to specific subjects within the
page. These sub-lists should form a "tree" hierarchy based on the
level of heading tag used for the specific subject. Inclusion of such sub-lists
for every page can make the index rather lengthy, and since each page should
include its own <a href="#page-index">Page Index</a>, it may make the navigation
of the documentation easier if such sub-lists are avoided. However, there is
one exception to this guideline: reference documentation should contain a link
to every header file in the library and a sub-list with a link to every macro,
value, type, class, function and object (see <a href="structure.html">Documentation
Structure</a>) found in the header. Users aren't always sure what header file
any of these may be contained in, so this structure in the index allows for
easy navigation of the reference documentation.</p>
<p>The index list should generally be constructed using an HTML "definition
list" (<dl> and <dt> tags). A definition list has no bullets
or ordered specifications and produces a cleaner layout then an unordered list
(<ul> and <li> tags) or an ordered list (<ol> and <li>
tags). If you choose to use the common <a href="#boost-style-sheet">Boost Style
Sheet</a> you should add a <code>class="index"</code> attribute/value pair to
the <dl> tag.</p>
<p>An Index page <a href="#index-template">template</a> is provided for use.</p>
<h3><a name="overview-page"></a>Overview</h3>
<p>The Overview page is used to introduce the reader to the library. It should
give a high-level overview of the purpose of the library and introduce the reader
to any concepts they may be unfamiliar with. This may also be an appropriate
place for some "light" rationale, though more thorough presentation
of any rationale would be better placed in the <a href="#rationale-page">Rational
Page</a>.</p>
<p>Like most content pages, the Overview page should include a <a href="#page-index">Page
Index</a>.</p>
<p>An Overview page <a href="#overview-template">template</a> is provided for
use.</p>
<h3><a name="definitions-page"></a>Definitions</h3>
<p>The Definitions page is used to provide a list of definitions for terms that
a user may be unfamiliar with.</p>
<p>The definition list should generally be constructed using an HTML "definition
list" (<dl> and <DT> tags). A definition list has no bullets
or ordered specifications and produces a cleaner layout then an unordered list
(<UL> and <li> tags) or an ordered list (<ol> and <li>
tags). If you choose to use the common <a href="#boost-style-sheet">Boost Style
Sheet</a> you should add a <code>class="definition"</code> attribute/value pair
to the <dl> tag.</p>
<p>Because this page's content should only contain a list of definitions, it should
not have a <a href="#page-index">Page Index</a>.</p>
<p></p>
<p> A Definitions page <a href="#definitions-template">template</a> is provided
for use.</p>
<h3><a name="rationale-page"></a>Rationale</h3>
<p>The Rationale page is used to provide lengthy descriptions of the rationale
behind the library's design. This information helps users to understand why
a library was designed the way it was and may reduce the frequency of a number
of frequently asked questions. For a better description of why rationale is
important see the <a href="http://www.boost.org/more/lib_guide.htm#Rationale">Rationale
rationale</a> in the general submission guidelines.</p>
<p>Like most content pages, the Rationale page should include a <a href="#page-index">Page
Index</a>.</p>
<p></p>
<p>A Rationale page <a href="#rationale-template">template</a> is provided for
use.</p>
<h3><a name="configuration-page"></a>Configuration Information</h3>
<p>The Configuration Information page is used to document configuration macros
used by the library. Such macros belong in one of three groups: macros used
by library implenters defined in <code><boost/config.hpp></code>, macros
used by library users to detect platform configuration information and macros
defined by library users to configure library behavior.</p>
<p>Like most content pages, the Overview page should include a <a href="#page-index">Page
Index</a>.</p>
<p></p>
<p>A Configuration page <a href="#configuration-template">template</a> is provided
for use.</p>
<h3><a name="faq-page"></a>Frequently Asked Questions</h3>
<p>As a library matures the users will have questions about the usage of the library.
Often users will ask the same questions over and over again. Rather than having
to deal with answering the question every time it's asked, a Frequently Asked
Questions (commonly known as FAQs) page can be used to document the questions
and answers. This is such a valuable piece of documentation not only for the
users but for the maintainers as well, that a FAQ page should be provided from
the outset. If there are no questions that will obviously become a FAQ, the
initial page may just indicate that there are no FAQs yet. This empty place
holder helps to indicate to the users that you plan to address any FAQs as they
occur.</p>
<p>The <a href="#page-index">Page Index</a> for the FAQ page should contain a
list of all the questions contained in the document. The actual question entries
should be formatted with the question in a heading tag and the answers in standard
paragraph format. This provides a clean presentation that's easy to read.</p>
<p>A Frequently Asked Questions page <a href="#faq-template">template</a> is provided
for use.</p>
<h3><a name="bibliography-page"></a>Bibliography</h3>
<p>The Bibliography page is used to document any bibliographical information associated
with references made within the documentation to external resources. Parenthetical
references are used within the documentation which link to entries in the Bibliography
page. Bibliographical entries provide detailed information about the external
resource and may contain hyper links to the resource if it's available online.
There are several formal styles used for writing bibliographies. You may use
what ever style you want, but one of the better styles to consider using can
be referenced <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/cgos/idx_basic.html">here</a>.</p>
<p>Since the Bibliography page should contain only bibliographical information
there is no need for a <a href="#page-index">Page Index</a>.</p>
<p>A Bibliography page <a href="#bibliography-template">template</a> is provided
for use.</p>
<h3><a name="acknowledgements-page"></a>Acknowledgment</h3>
<p>The Acknowledgment page is used to give credit where credit is due. When individuals
provide input on the design or implementation, or when you make use of someone
else's work, you should acknowledge them. This is a courtesy that you'd expect
others to extend to you, so you should strive to acknowledge the efforts of
everyone else in your own documentation.</p>
<p>Since the Acknowledgment page should contain only a list of acknowledgment
there is no need for a <a href="#page-index">Page Index</a>.</p>
<p>An Acknowledgments page <a href="#acknowledgements-template">template</a> is
provided for use.</p>
<h3><a name="header-page"></a>Header Reference</h3>
<p>The Header Reference pages are the most important pages in your documentation.
They document all library headers, including all the macros, values, types,
classes, functions and objects defined in them. In general it may prove useful
to follow the guidelines in <a href="structure.html">Documentation Structure</a>
when writing the content for these pages.</p>
<p>Like most content pages, the Header Reference pages should include a <a href="#page-index">Page
Index</a>.</p>
<p>A Header Reference page <a href="#header-template">template</a> is provided
for use.</p>
<h2><a name="layout"></a>Layout</h2>
<p>There are certain page layout concepts that will be used frequently in many
of your pages. This section outlines some general guidelines that you can follow
when designing each of these layout concepts for your documentation.</p>
<h3><a name="page-banner"></a>Page Banner</h3>
<p>The Page Banner is located at the very top of a page and provides quick information
about the page contents. This includes the Boost logo, which indicates to the
reader that this page is part of the Boost web site, a title for the documentation
(generally the library name) and the page title. The Boost logo should hyper
link to the Boost home page on the index page and to the index page on all other
pages. This allows the user to easily navigate through the Boost web site and
through the documentation. The <title> tag for the HTML page should consist
of the documentation title and the page title separated by a hyphen.</p>
<p>The Page Banner should be separated from the rest of the page by the use of
an <hr> tag. This helps to clearly separate the actual content from the
title information and produces cleaner text.</p>
<h3><a name="page-index"></a>Page Index</h3>
<p>The page index is used to quickly navigate to the various sections of the documentation
on the page, and when present should be located just below the Page Banner.</p>
<p>The index list should generally be constructed using an HTML "definition
list" (<dl> and <DT> tags). A definition list has no bullets
or ordered specifications and produces a cleaner layout then an unordered list
(<UL> and <li> tags) or an ordered list (<ol> and <li>
tags). If you choose to use the Boost Style Sheet you should add a <code>class="page-index"</code>
attribute/value pair to the <dl> tag.</p>
<p>Most pages should include a Page Index.</p>
<h3><a name="content"></a>Documentation Content</h3>
<p>The page's actual documentation content will be formatted according to the
specific needs of individual pages, and should be placed right after the Page
Index if present, or after the Page Banner if not. In general the documentation
content will take the form of paragraph text contained underneath section headings.</p>
<h3><a name="doc-footnotes"></a>Footnotes</h3>
<p>Footnotes may be used within a page's documentation. Within the documentation
content a footnote reference should take the form of a footnote number in parentheses
(the parentheses make it easier for the reader to click on the hyper link) hyper
linking to the actual footnote at the bottom of the page's documentation content.
You may either use the <sup> tag to format such footnote numbers, or,
preferably, you can use a CSS style class in order to distinguish the number
as a footnote instead of as part of the actual text. If you choose to use the
common <a href="#boost-style-sheet">Boost Style Sheet</a>, a <code>footnote</code>
class is defined for this purpose.</p>
<h3><a name="revision-info"></a>Revision Information</h3>
<p>At the bottom of every page should be some revision information indicating
when the page was last revised. This information should be separated from the
rest of the page above by an <hr> tag. The following HTML code snippet
can be used to track this revision information (this code uses some server components
that exist on the Boost web site to automatically track revision dates with
out the need for hand editing the date text):</p>
<pre><hr>
<p>Revised
<!--webbot bot="Timestamp" S-Type="EDITED" S-Format="%d %B, %Y" startspan -->
01 January, 2001
<!--webbot bot="Timestamp" endspan i-checksum="39359" -->
</p>
</pre>
<h3><a name="copyright"></a>Copyright Information</h3>
<p>The very bottom of the page should contain any copyright information that applies
to the document.</p>
<h2><a name="format"></a>Format</h2>
<p>This section provides general guidelines for formatting documentation using
HTML. The description of the various "common pages" gave specific
details for formatting specific sections of the documentation, which should
override these guidelines.</p>
<h3><a name="code-format"></a>Code</h3>
<p>Code within the documentation should be placed within either <code></code>
or <pre></pre> tags. For code that's placed inline with other text
you use <code></code> tags, while <pre></pre> tags are
used for code "blocks". If a cascading style sheet is used to specify
formatting for these tags, a fixed width sans serif font should be used. This
insures that the code is easily distinguishable from the rest of the text. It
may also be beneficial to set the style for <pre></pre> tags to
indent the text, to help separate code blocks from other structural HTML blocks.
The <a href="#boost-style-sheet">Boost Style Sheet</a> specifies formatting
for these tags.</p>
<p><b>Note:</b> "Code" includes variable names, function names, etc.</p>
<h3><a name="lists"></a>Lists</h3>
<p>Lists should be constructed as unordered (<UL> and <li> tags),
ordered (<ol> and <li> tags) or definition (<dl> and <DT>
tags) lists in HTML. You use an unordered list when you need a collection of
items that don't have any kind of logical ordering, such as a list of data types
that are defined by the library and can be used for a template argument. You
use an ordered list when the collection of items must be grouped in a logical
ordering, such as when enumerating the steps that an action logically performs.
You use a definition list when the list consists of not only items that have
no logical ordering, but also contains definitions/descriptions/etc. of the
items. A good example of this is the function specifications as described in
<a href="structure.html">Documentation Structure</a>.</p>
<h3><a name="graphics"></a>Graphics</h3>
<p>Graphics should be used very sparingly, if at all. Graphic images greatly effect
the download time for many people, which can discourage users from reading the
documentation. If you need graphic images to help illustrate something in your
documentation consider supplying only a link to the image within the documentation,
instead of embedding it directly in the text. If an image is going to be included
in the text of the document you should specify the image's size in the <img>
tag, in order to allow the user's browser to optimize the formatting of the
text before the image is loaded.</p>
<h3><a name="non-breaking-spaces"></a>Non-breaking Spaces</h3>
<p>Non-breaking spaces (&nbsp;) should be avoided in HTML text. Generally
there are more appropriate ways to format the document, such as using list constructs
or specifying indentation as a style attribute or in cascading style sheets.</p>
<h3><a name="style-sheets"></a>Cascading Style Sheets</h3>
<p>Cascading style sheets allow you to apply some advanced formatting styles to
an HTML document. More importantly, they allow you to change the formatting
in a single file and effect all pages using the style sheet. Instead of struggling
to produce a specific format in HTML it's often easier and more flexible to
specify the formatting in a style sheet.</p>
<h4><a name="boost-style-sheet"></a>Boost Style Sheet</h4>
<p>The concept of using cascading style sheets to format HTML is such a good idea
that it can be beneficial to apply this across the entire Boost site. Of course
we can't require this (if Boost were to require such trivia for submissions
it's likely that many programmers would be discouraged from contributing). However,
a "standard" Boost style sheet (http://www.boost.org/boost.css) is
supplied anyway, so that a contributer can quickly and easily produce clear
and consistent documentation that reflects a Boost "brand" if they
so choose. If, at a later date, it's decided to update the Boost "brand",
it may be done in this single file and all documents using the style sheet will
automatically be updated.</p>
<p>The Boost supplied style sheet not only specifies styles for many standard
tags, it also specifies several style "classes". A class is specified
for a given tag instead of being applied to all instances of a given tag type.
Below is a list of the classes specified in the Boost style sheet and a description
of when to use them:</p>
<dl>
<dt><b>index</b> Used for <dl> tags when writing index lists.</dt>
<dt><b>page-index</b> Used for <dl> tags when writing page index lists.</dt>
<dt><b>Footnote</b> Used when writing Footnote numbers.</dt>
<dt><b>function-semantics</b> Used for <dl> tags when writing function
semantic lists.</dt>
</dl>
<h2><a name="templates"></a>Templates</h2>
<p>Instead of hand coding every HTML page, HTML "templates" can be used instead.
The list below provides links to templates that may be used when writing documentation
for a contribution to Boost. Links provided in these templates assume the files
will reside in the "traditional" directory hierarchy of <i>boost/libs/library/doc</i>.
They may need correcting if the file will reside in some other location.</p>
<p><b>Note:</b> Since these "templates" are just HTML pages simply clicking
on the links below will load the template in your browser. You will need to
use a browser specific method to download the files instead of loading them
into the browser (for instance, on most Windows browsers you can right click
on the link and select the appropriate command from the context sensitive menu).</p>
<ul>
<li><a name="index-template"></a><a href="template/index.html">Index Page Template</a></li>
<li><a name="overview-template"></a><a href="template/overview.html">Overview
Page Template</a></li>
<li><a name="definitions-template"></a><a href="template/definitions.html">Definitions
Page Template</a></li>
<li><a name="rationale-template"></a><a href="template/rationale.html">Rationale
Page Template</a></li>
<li><a name="configuration-template"></a><a href="template/configuration.html">Configuration
Page Template</a></li>
<li><a name="faq-template"></a><a href="template/faq.html">FAQ (Frequently Asked
Questions) Page Template</a></li>
<li><a name="bibliography-template"></a><a href="template/bibliography.html">Bibliography
Page Template</a></li>
<li><a name="acknowledgements-template"></a><a href="template/acknowledgments.html">Acknowledgments
Page Template</a></li>
<li><a name="header-template"></a><a href="template/header.html">Header Page
Template</a></li>
</ul>
<hr>
<p>Revised
<!--webbot bot="Timestamp" S-Type="EDITED" S-Format="%d %B, %Y" startspan -->29 November, 2003<!--webbot bot="Timestamp" endspan i-checksum="39371" -->
</p>
<p><i>© Copyright <a href="mailto:williamkempf@hotmail.com">William E. Kempf</a>
2001. All Rights Reserved.</i></p>
</body>
</html>
|
