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US

Not USA. There is hardly every any need to spell out United States, even at first mention. America is preferable in some contexts (“God bless the US” would sound silly).  It is permissible to use "American" instead of "US" as an adjective.

very

Don't use it – it's usually redundant. Just think of a better word. Not “very big”, but huge, vast, etc. Not "very small", but tiny, minute, etc.

The exceptions are when "very" is used to mean "actual; precise" as in those were his very words, or to mean "without addition; mere" as in the very thought made her shudder. Those uses are fine.

See words to avoid in web texts.

video

Mark up videos using the <figure> HTML tag. Mark up the caption using <figcaption>.

Embedding videos from CDS

All CDS videos have an option below them to "Embed this video into your page".

Click this, and simply copy the iframe, and paste it into the source HTML view of your Drupal page. Remember to resize the video by editing the HTML code "width" and "height" attributes if necessary.

Embedding videos from YouTube

For all YouTube videos add ?wmode=opaque to the end of an embedded iframe's URL.

web, the web

 

Lower case, and likewise for webpage, web address (but three cap Ws and no hyphen for the World Wide Web, in the unlikely event that you ever need to refer to it that way).

White Paper

Capital W, capital P.

A White Paper is an authoritative report or guide helping readers understand an issue, solve a problem, or make a decision.

CERN openlab – the public-private partnership between CERN, leading IT companies and research institutes – today released a White Paper on future IT challenges in scientific research.

Who or which?

While in normal circumstances 'who' is used to refer only to people and 'which' or 'that' to refer to things, on the home.cern website we try to refer to departments and organisations (since they are made up of people) as 'who'.

 

word count

Use the following word counts for content types on the public website. These formats are defined in detail under the Formats tab above. You'll notice from the table that word counts in French are approximately 30% longer.

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