The GNU/FSF Web Site Guidelines
These are style guidelines for writing WWW web pages in HTML for
the GNU web server.
The standards documented here are the default for the GNU
project website. All pages should appear this way by
default.
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.
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 standards.
- A boilerplates is provided, the primary boilerplate
- Acronyms and abbreviations should be added in the form where the first acronym or abbreviation in a section (ie. under a heading) is displayed in full - <acronym title="Alfred M. Szmidt">ams</acronym> but later occurences would simply be <acronym>ams</acronym>
- 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"><rms@gnu.org></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
. Some browsers (such as DosLynx) use
the Operating System current codepage so even if you use
  -- 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.
- 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.
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