Webpage copyediting tutorial
This tutorial illustrates one approach to copyediting the content of a website. It wll not describe the art of editing copy, as that is a necessary prequirement. Instead, it will go through one procedure of copyediting content that authors or website owners can approve (or disapprove) and retain for archival purposes.
Microsoft Word 2010 was used for this tutorial. However, any word processor that adequately works as an HTML web-page browser should work as well. Not all word processors display HTML and its edit-tracking markup well, so copyeditors will have to determine which word processors to use themselves.
General copyediting
Copyediting entails chiefly reviewing documents to search for any grammatical errors and other errors. Also, maintaining and otherwise updating documents also are additional copyediting tasks. If website users occasionally report various errors in websites, webmasters may fix those errors directly themselves without doing any other copyediting. When such copy errors in printed documents are discovered, many book publishers will compile them on errata lists, which they may continually post and update on their own corporate websites or on the websites of their authors. Subsequent printings or editions will usually correct those errata and possibly other errors that their own copyeditors have detected.
The copyediting stage begins immediately after or during its authoring stage. The copyeditors create edit-tracking markup for all edits, usually with color-coded text—typically using strikeouts for deletions, underlining for any added text, and change bars in the margin for any modified paragraphs. Afterwards, the marked-up versions of the files are returned to their authors, where they either accept or reject the suggested corrections and return the revisions back again to the copyeditors for, hopefully, final reviews. Almost all word processors have edit-tracking features.
If the material is intended to be an electronic (PDF) or print (book and pamphlet) documents and also be the subject matter for a website, it is best to perform all their copyediting in Word DOC (or DOCX) files. After the final copyediting is completed, the DOC files can be used (or converted into another, possibly a DTP, file format) for the print document and the DOC file can be converted into intermediate HTML files for the website. The HTML conversion will approximate the formatting of the DOC files into possibly useful CSS styles that can be manually modified into more useful, refined CSS by the more-skilled web designers or technical editors. The intermediate HTML files then can afterwards be stripped of most or all of its internal and inline CSS styles to be renamed and inserted into external CSS files, making the website more responsive.
Copyediting an existing webpage
Copyediting websites that are already online is much the same as for PDF or print documents, but with one major difference: The authors should not accept the edit-tracking changes of the files returned by the copyeditors—accepting the changes would make them dissappear among the markup. The authors should only reject the edits that they do not want—thereby leaving intact in the markup all the edit changes that they want corrected. The reason for manually editing current web pages is that word processors add tons of added internal and inline CSS to the Word HTML files that were used in the edit-tracking process. This tutorial will provide some actual sample files that can be downloaded in order that the reader can better understand the suggested method described in this tutorial for copyediting web pages.