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W3C

W3C Core Styles

The W3C Core Styles offer authors an easy way to start using style sheets without becoming designers. By adding a link in the head of your documents, a CSS browser will fetch the style sheet of your choice from W3C's server when it encounters your document. A non-CSS browser will display the HTML document like it always did.

To start using the W3C Core Styles, do the following:

  1. Pick your favorite style sheet from among the eight offerings: Chocolate, Midnight, Modernist, Oldstyle, Steely, Swiss, Traditional, and Ultramarine.
  2. add a LINK element to the head of your documents. Here is an example of how to do this in HTML 4.01:
    <!doctype html public '-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN'
      'http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd'>
    <html>
      <head>
        <title>Document title</title>
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/Core/Modernist" type="text/css">
      </head>
      ...
    

    or in XHTML 1.0:

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN'
      'http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd'>
    <html>
      <head>
        <title>Document title</title>
        <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/Core/Modernist" type="text/css" />
      </head>
      ...
    

    Check the HTML source of this page for a real example.

The W3C Core Styles have been designed and implemented by Todd Fahrner with help from colleagues at (at that time) Verso [link back to 1998]. This is an ongoing project to explore shared style sheets over the Web, and we encourage you to start using the Core Styles. When doing so, you should be aware that:


Bert Bos, W3C Curator

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