Core Issues for Starting a New Online Publication
This comes out of thinking and discussion with Blackbird staff and other digital publishing colleagues over the course of a number of years. This is an excerpt from working distillation from a longer 2020 draft, and is in progress.
- Address ADA compliance not just to meet institutional checkboxes, but with affected communities of readers.
- Respect the poetic line; take into account poetry, some drama, and other specialized texts or art pieces and being unrenderable in responsive design. Assuming poetry as much as a visual presentation as a textual one, provide a fixed-width display to respect and preserve mise-en-page.
- Address layout of poetry in HTML with your designer with the awareness that setting an html content is not at all like setting pages in WHIZYWIG text processors.
- Ensure that content in individual issues won’t be broken or corrupted by future changes to a global template’s CSS.
[Addendum 7/17/2023. As VCU prepares to launch a new version of the journal on a new platform, I need to clarify that I was not assigned to that project, and the notes and reports I had produced (briefly referenced above) were not taken into account.]
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