W3C Style Sheets

This page documents how W3C uses style sheets on our own server. Due to a large number of historical documents which we still want to make available, documents on our server are not consistent in their use of style sheets. However, if you author new documents you must use style sheets.

This page is publically readable. If you come from the outside, feel free to look around to see how we use style sheets at W3C. Some of the pages pointed to from these pages aren't publically readable. Though.

Using Style sheets on our documents has many benefits:

the look of ours pages become more consitent
the HTML markup on our pages become simpler
as an author, you don't have to worry much about presentation issues

In order to use style stheets with your document, you have to do two things:

find the right category for your document
insert a LINK element pointing to the style sheet in your document

The next two sections describe these steps in more detail.

W3C document types

The list below contains common document types on the W3C server and each of these types should have a style sheet associated with it. Some of them will be quite similar in the beginning, but will allow more distinct presentations when we are ready.

Please use the style sheets where they exist, else the generic style sheet for the access level - Tim.

Team categories

category	style sheet	sample page
plan
Team guide (hitchhikers guide to..)
team minutes (team-minutes.css)
team page
mail archive
message in archive
generic pages (team.css)

Member categories

category	style sheet	sample page
briefing
newswire
newsletter
Public office pages	office.css
Internal office pages (for use by the office staffs)	officeStaff.css
process document
WG page
WG minutes
WG mail archive
WG charter
The Art of Consensus: Guide for collborators and chairs
mail archive
message in archive
generic pages	team.css
generic pages	member.css

Public categories

category	style sheet	sample page
activity statement	activity.css
overview page	activity-home.css
Recommendation	TR/W3C-REC.css
Proposed Recommendation	TR/W3C-PR .css
Working Draft	TR/W3C-WD.css
Note	TR/W3C-NOTE.css
press release
submission
FAQ
the front page
mail archive
message in archive
generic pages	base.css

Linking to style sheets

To link to style sheets from your documents, add the following in the head of your document:

    <LINK REL="stylesheet" TYPE="text/css" HREF="/StyleSheets/xxxxxx">

Then replace the x'es with the name of your style sheet, e.g. "member". The ".css" extension is not necessary. So, the start of your document will typically look something like:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN"
             "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/strict.dtd">
<HTML>
  <HEAD>
    <TITLE>W3C Member Site</TITLE>
    <LINK REL="stylesheet" TYPE="text/css" HREF="/Stylesheets/member">
  </HEAD>
  </BODY>
     ...

There are special rules for our Technical Reports.

W3C classes

Below is a very sketchy list of possible class names to encode semantics. Using these, we could e.g. give member-only links a certain color.

`A.member`	member only links
`P.policy`	Policy footnotes
`.editorial`	editorial remarks
`.errata`	errata to our specifications
`.speaker`	The name of the speaker in the minutes
`.site`	The name of the site in minutes
`.action`	Outsanding action item
`.done`	Completed action item

This list will never become complete, but we should try to converge around a core set of classes for each of the document types.

Håkon, with input from Henrik, Tim, Bert, Chris, Sally.