O'Reilly Network Author Guidelines

Dear O'Reilly Author,

When submitting articles for publication, you have two options: plain ASCII text or HTML.

  • Since we have a terrific database/template publishing system, writers and editors only need to use simple tags if they prefer to submit HTML documents. We comply with XHTML "standards", which, as you know, basically means we close all tags, use lower case, and use <br /> for the break tag.

  • BASIC FORMATTING:

    • <h2></h2> Headline
    • <h3></h3> Subhead
    • <ul><li></li></ul> Unordered list (<ol> for ordered).
    • <p></p> paragraph.
    • <a href=""> for hyperlinking
    • <img src="" /> for graphics

    We also use the <pre> and <code> tags.

  • You don't need to worry about <html>, <head>, <body>, and tags of that nature, but I would like a list of KEYWORDS to go with the article. Our system automatically formats the metatags for search engines. I'll enter the keywords separately.

  • If you're including CODE, try to keep the line width to 50 characters. We hate screwing up author's code by breaking lines that are too long for our layout template.

  • IMAGES should be no wider than 450 pixels if they are to be included in the body of the article. If you have screen shots or other images that are larger than this, please send us the original screen shot. We will resize it and/or present a thumbnail view that leads to a full-size pop up version. The main thing is to send high-quality originals rather than something that has been quickly resized or otherwise manipulated. Please include CAPTIONS too.

  • HANDLING URLs: We prefer to not list the URLs for links directly in articles. We'll usually handle this in production by re-casting the sentence -- for example, instead of:

    See http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2000/08/18/magazine/infinite_xbl.htm l for more information.

    We would say something like:

    See Andrew Wooldridge's Infinite Extensibility with XBL for more information.

  • AUTHOR'S INFO: If this is your first article, please include a personal "bio," your e-mail for readers, and a contact phone number for us in case we need to reach you during the final stages of preparation. We include your bio and e-mail on a special author's page with a listing of your articles published on the O'Reilly Network. You may include a web site in your bio if you wish.

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