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The GNU/FSF Web Site Guidelines

These are style guidelines for writing WWW web pages in HTML for the GNU/FSF web server.

The standards documented here are the default for the GNU project and FSF websites. All pages should appear this way by default. However, if you want to design alternative pages that differ from these guidelines, it's all right to do so as long as those features are supported by some Free Software web browsers.

However, when new features are used, they should be used in a consistent way, and standards should be developed for how we use them. Please contact the other maintainers of www.gnu.org pages that use similar features, and discuss with them new standards for using these features, so we can note those new standards here.

Talk with <webmasters@gnu.org> if you are having trouble finding other web page authors using the features you are interested in.

Please note, however, that regardless, frames should not be used, even in the alternative pages, because they interfere with bookmarking. But if you think you know of a good reason to use frames, please tell us about it.

Table of Contents

• Copyright Guidelines
• General Guidelines
• Filename and URL Guidelines
• HTML Guidelines
• Use of Graphics
• Useful Resources

Copyright Guidelines

• Every page should have a Copyright notice.
• The default is what's at the bottom of boilerplate.html.
• If the page is copyrighted by someone else, make sure their Copyright notice replaces the FSF Copyright, but maintains the address, etc. The user of our pages should always find the copyright information at the same place on each page.
• If the source text for a set of pages is copyrighted by someone else, (i.e. you split a document into more than one page) make sure their Copyright notice is at the bottom of each page, where the default FSF Copyright notice would otherwise be.
• All pages should have a notice saying that they are freely distributable. If you can not get such a permission from the author, please discuss this with the webmasters first.

General Guidelines

• Good spelling is encouraged.
• The FSF will install only free software on the GNU web server. We prefer that only free software be used to develop content for the GNU web server.
• The GNU web server only lists and links only to free software. The software's source code and executables have to be freely redistributable and modifiable to and by all people, companies, and organizations. If in doubt, ask <gnu@gnu.org>.
• The GNU web server gives priority to software covered by either the GNU General Public License or GNU Lesser General Public License, which is always listed first.
• The GNU web server is interested first in content. Substance is more important than style. The use of graphics should be minimized so pages load fast over slow links. The GNU Project is for everyone, even those with slow Internet access or text-only WWW browsers.
• Often a page will start off with some links, then have the GNU text. The goal is to get each user quickly to what they want to find out, having most of the info on the first screen. This is similar to having the start of a Menu within the first 24 lines of an Info page.
• Offer a document in as many formats as the GNU Project has it. For an example, see The GNU Free Documentation License. This lets the user get the document in the format most useful to him.
• Before you take any graphics or text from another Web site, please ask for permission to use it. It's polite to do so. It is also essential for us to avoid copyright infringement.
• Do not list an address of an individual, including the maintainer of a GNU package, unless explicitly asked to have it listed. Most GNU maintainers do not want a lot of extra mail and prefer to get bug reports, etc. from the GNU bug report mailing lists (50k characters).

Filename and URL Guidelines

• Hand-written URLs which refer to other files should be absolute, starting from the root page. That is, file names should start with "/" (e.g. "/order/order.html", not "http://www.gnu.org/"). This makes it easier to copy and paste "<a href="s from other pages, and also makes it easier to set up mirror servers.
• It is ok to omit the file name entirely when referring to a tag in the same file.
• When the link points to another page on the GNU server, omit the word "http:" at the beginning. In other words, use "http:" only before a host name.
• Collections of files produced automatically from Texinfo source contain links with relative file names. They always refer to another file in the same directory. These relative links are to be tolerated.
• To make it easier to edit many files at once in Emacs:
  • Try and give each HTML file a unique name.
  • The filename index.html should only be used as a symbolic link.
• Each directory, in the web server tree, should have an index.html symbolic link to the top-level html file for that directory. Use the .symlinks file to handle this.
• Don't use just a directory name in a URL; always include the specific file name. E.g. use "/gnu/gnu-history.html" not just "/gnu/". Never use "index.html" in a URL. Both of these are kindnesses to the users, as browsers change the highlighting on a link if a user has already seen it. If the link is known by several different file names, the user will not get a highlighted link on the file names the user hasn't explicitly referenced. So the user goes to pages the user has already seen, which is irritating. Also, this helps mirroring.

HTML Guidelines

• Our goal is to get information to people. Keeping the site design simple helps accomplish that.
• HTML on the GNU web server should be strictly compliant with W3C and ISO standards. Though we generally use XHTML 1.0 Strict, with content type text/html, we prefer ISO 15445 or HTML 4.01 Strict. We don't want to experiment with non-standard browser features. Though XML and XHTML are important, when they are used they need to follow both accessibility standards, and the guidelines for HTML compatibility. Please be meticulously careful to make our documents accessible. For example, XHTML normally uses MIME type xhtml+xml which many browsers do not recognize, (it is understand that this will be implimented with IE 7, though the question still stands regarding the breadth of IE's XHTML support; lynx added support for xhtml+xml with 2.8.6dev.5, and text/xml and application/xml with 2.8.6dev.11). Also, even though the HTML compatibility guidelines assist with backwards compatibility to some browsers (such as MS IE), they will be interpreted incorrectly by strict HTML and SGML parsers. It is important that the pages on the GNU web server, display well on all browsers, even those that implement no more than HTML 2.0. Using HTML 2.0 is fine; we'd prefer you didn't use HTML 3.2. ISO HTML is best for most situations. Use XHTML to benefit the use of XML and XHTML modularity.
• Two boilerplates are provided, the primary boilerplate, and a XHTML boilerplate. When in doubt use the primary boilerplate, as you will know when you need or want XHTML.
• Regarding character encoding, in general, the use of 8 bit unicode makes life easy on our translators, so when using XHTML, UTF-8 is preferred as a general rule. When using HTML please keep in mind the W3C recommendation and the appropriate character set respective to the language in question.
• We support the Best Viewed with Any Browser campaign, and WAI.
• Please be considerate of all who access our web pages, and accomodate them, including those who use text-only browsers, or old browsers. We wish to prevent HTML design that looks great under one version of one browser, and ugly under many others. Of course, please don't install any of the proprietary software browsers available if you don't already use them anyway.
• Please follow the above mentioned web standards strictly. Don't neglect required elements such as <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE> <BODY>, etc. when using (X)HTML, and always include the appropriate DTD or Schema reference. This makes up for overly pedantic browsers.
• All pages should have contact info for both the FSF (or responsible party) and the webmasters at the bottom of each page. The reason to note this at the bottom is so the user always finds this contact information at the same place on each page.
• The first header tag, <H[n]>, should have its text duplicated at the start of the <TITLE> tag. The <TITLE> tag is used by many browsers in menus like the history and bookmarks lists, as a link to that page. It helps the user to have them the same, so when he clicks on an item in a list, he gets a page with the same "TITLE". Please properly use your headers in numerical order: 1, 2, etc. These are not used for looks, but for the organization of the document.
• The <TITLE> tag should include the phrases "GNU Project" and "Free Software Foundation (FSF)" so the pages will be found when WWW search engines are used. The default is to add this at the end: " - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)".
• The <HEAD> pair should have this line after the <TITLE> pair:
  <LINK rev="made" href="mailto:webmasters@gnu.org">
  Some browsers use this information to allow users to easily report problems they find on a page.
• On pages with dated entries (e.g. What's New, Thank GNUs, and GNU's Bulletins, the newer entries should be first (i.e reverse chronological order).
• Cite people with e-mail addresses this way:

  <A href="http://www.stallman.org/rms.html">Richard Stallman</A>
  <A href="mailto:rms@gnu.org">&lt;rms@gnu.org&gt;</A>
         

  which browsers display this way:
  Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
  It is less confusing to the user, because it's clear what is a http: link to another WWW page and what is a mailto: anchor that will bring up a mail form to fill out and send, if this is supported by the client. Also, if the user saves a copy of the page, he will have a copy of the e-mail address he can use, without going back to his web browser. If the person doesn't have a web page, leave the name unanchored.
• Cite FTP locations of source code with the full URL of the directory they are in:

  <A href="ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/GNUinfo/standards.info"><URL:ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/GNUinfo/standards.info></A>
         

  which browsers display this way:
  <URL:ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/GNUinfo/standards.info>
  It is less confusing to the user, because it's clear that it's source code to download, not a http: link to another WWW page. Also, if the user saves a copy of the page, he will have a copy of the FTP location he can use, without going back to his web broswer. We encourage FTP sites to use a directory for each package, and only put one package's files in each directory, so that the users can see what versions of that package and related information can be downloaded (e.g. a ReadMe file, information of what versions are available, documentations, fonts, etc.). Also, it means that the FTP location URLs do not need to be changed, on this and other sites, as new versions are released into that directory.
• There is no reliable way to make a non-breaking space in HTML. Despite the standard, many browsers out there don't understand &nbsp;. Some browsers (such as DosLynx) use the Operating System current codepage so even if you use &#160; -- the ISO Latin-1 code -- it still won't look right.
• If you specify any color attribute, you should specify all of them that are allowed for that tag. This is because some browsers allow users to specify defaults for the color attributes, and the user's choices could conflict with your choices, as your choices override the user's choices. In the worse case, the foreground and background could end up the same. Please use a style sheet for this, and not HTML 3.2 (HTML 4 Transitional) deprecated markup.
• Please use tables to organize data, not the presentation of the webpage.
• Some people like to use tables to organize links as a menu to the left or right of content when using graphical browsers. That does not work very well with text browsers since they will make the menu appear either on top of the page or at the bottom. If you have a menu that is more than 30 lines long, then it's very probable that a user viewing the page will never bother to read the text because it will be too far down. You should make an effort to keep such menus under 20 lines long so that the content of the page is visible on the first page when viewing it with a text browser. A menu bar of one or two horizontal lines might accomplish your purpose as well.
• Consider others linking to your page when removing page anchors. Also, though ID is prefered, include name, so as to be backwards compatible with older browsers. Please use /gnu.css for your stylesheet, unless you have a specific reason to do otherwise. Please do not break the style of other pages that use gnu.css.
• Screen reader software used by most blind people reads the text from left to right, ignoring any tables that you make. If you use tables, you should make an effort to make sure that reading a whole page left to right doesn't confuse such software. Please follow the WAI compatibility guidelines to ensure that tables are properly marked for accessibility.
• SGML and XML are case sensitive. TITLE and title are not the same thing in HTML. (This means that text/html and application/xhtml+xml are mutually exclusive, which also means that strictly speaking XHTML and HTML are mutually exclusive.)
• Do not add comments at the top of a document. Web browsers expect the doctype, XML declaration, or Schema to be at the top. Comments will confuse web browsers, and often cause them to incorrectly interpret your markup.

Use of Graphics

• The use of graphics should be minimized, so pages load fast over slow links, especially animations. The GNU Project is for everyone, even those with slow Internet access and/or text-only WWW browsers.
• In the past, GIFs have had patent problems. However, now that the IBM and Unisys patents (and other patents world-wide that are relevant to LZW compression), GIFs that are based on the 87a or 89a standard are acceptable. Please be wary of proprietary applications that may include non-standard patented technologies (we'd prefer you use free software applications when authoring for our websites). In general, PNG or JPEG format, are still safe, and are probably better from a technical standpoint. For details regarding the old GIF problem, see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html. Other formats are also allowed, though JPEG is the one most widely recognized by Web browsers, (be careful with JPEG 2000, as well as PNG alpha channels, as it includes features not fully supported by older browsers).
• Before you take any graphics or text from another Web site, please ask for permission to use it. It's polite to do so. It is also essential for us to avoid copyright infringement.
• Whenever you add a graphic to this site's web pages, please:
  • locate the graphic file in the '/graphics/' subdirectory.
  • create a new html web page in '/graphics/'
  • add a link to it on the GNU graphics page. This is so it's easy for visitors to the site to find all the graphics on the site in one place.
• Tag all images like this:
  
  This will allow the user to quickly go to a page related to the picture if he or she is interested.
• Always have a textual alternative for in-line images:
  <img src="/graphics/*.jpg" alt=" [Image of DESCRIPTIVE TEXT] ">.
  The FSF wants users who have text-only access to the Web to be treated as well as those who have both text and graphic access.
  We add the spaces and square brackets to separate the DESCRIPTIVE TEXT from adjacent text, and help the user realize that this is a stand-in for a graphic.
• Use width and height attributes for in-line images, but not in ISO HTML:
  <img src="/graphics/*.jpg" alt=" [Image of DESCRIPTIVE TEXT] " width="999" height="666" />.
  This improves the performance of, and display on, some browsers.
• We do not use backgrounds on our pages, as they make text significantly harder to read. Improving readability is also the reason we specify black text on a white background as the default on our pages.
• Sometimes it can be useful to add some HTML tags, for example with <SPAN> and CSS, that gives a broader "white" area around a block of text. This can be used to draw more attention to one block in the text.

Useful Resources

• Appendix B Tips and Hints, and other style tips in the Texinfo Manual.
• We follow the guidelines of Best Viewed with Any Browser campaign.
• Basic info on the WWW and its technical specifications can be found at The World Wide Web Consortium.
• Use of the ISO standard for the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) allows for consistent backwards compatibility among web user agents.
• The GNU web server follows the w3.org Style Guide.

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