The Dogma W4 - details and explanation

Ad 2. The header

In the document header a short and cogent title...

Author must presume, that document title may exist separately, without context - as bookmark's name, heading in automatic document indexing etc. Content of <title> tag must therefore be brief and faithfully identify the document in context of web and Internet.

... the name and e-mail of author(s) of the code...

Users don't usually care for the code author. Here it is required as help for authors themselves. When author honors The W4D Principles, he probably wants his code to be perfect and his documents to be widely accessible. Nobody is unfailing and when one publishes his contact, he enables everyone to inform him about possible mistakes and document usability problems.

The authors' names and contact information are written in meta-tag, i.e.:

<meta name="author" content="HTML code: Petr Stanicek; e-mail: pixy@pixy.cz" />

or in separate document referred in header by the <link> tag.

Names should be rewritten using conventional English transcription - Japanese or Russian names may be presented as "???? ???????", which brings no good.

... and the character encoding, if it differs from default, must be present.

Even when the document encoding is set in HTTP header and the document renders correctly, information about encoding disappears after saving to hard disc, which may cause the document not to render correctly again. Therefore it is important to specify used character set in the document.

Encoding is declared in meta-tag, i.e.:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-2" />

Documents with XML declaration must contain encoding in this declaration, i.e.:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-2"?>