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CIF : Overview : What are the main issues in CIF design?

The CIF design standards are intended to permit individual chunks of information to display accurately under a very wide range of possible HTML environments within which they may find themselves. This effectively separates content from presentation, permitting CIF modules to play in a wide range of guises. A CIF page may not be able to control how much pixel space it has available, for example, so it must dynamically resize itself to fit a constraining frame. To permit interchange of content between multiple institutions it must have some way of identifying its sources. A tutorial page that is part of a CIF series may be presented "out of sequence" to a user and therefore must carry with it some sort of brief navigational control to help the user see that it is part of a series. Very simple color, font, and heading standards permit modules developed by different authors to visually combine with one another to dynamically form series if needed. Naming standards for CIF pages simplify distribution of mutli-page tutorials as separate directory structures, which may have optional associated lexical scanner logic modules if they are to be indexed in conjunction with the Lexical Scanner Project (Lex). For details, read the CIF module on coding standards.

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