NYPL Style Guide

CSS: Steal These Style Sheets!

The two CSS files linked from this page can be used as-is, or modified to the design requirements of your site.

Simple Style Sheet
  1. Sets body margins and padding to zero (no offset);
  2. establishes text, background, and various stage link colors;
  3. sets text font family to Georgia, Palatino, or equivalent but does not set size (sophisticated style sheet does that);
  4. establishes link rollover effect;
  5. sets up paragraph leading (line-height) of 150%;
  6. turns off gaps and borders around images
  7. establishes pseudo-classes for control of vertical whitespace
  8. establishes font-family and relative size relationships of headlines and subheads—also their margins;
  9. provides additional pseudo-classes for special design requirements
  10. assuming CSS file resides in /styles/ directory within root directory, file should be linked to from header thusly:
    <link rel="Stylesheet" href="/styles/simple.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
Sophisticated Style Sheet
  1. Sets paragraph font size to small (CSS font-size keyword), enabling text to be resized in most browsers;
  2. works around CSS bugs in IE4/5/5.5/Win and Opera 4/5;
  3. hides size rule from Netscape 4
  4. assuming CSS file resides in /styles/ directory within root directory, file should be linked to from header thusly:
    <style type="text/css" media="all">@import "/styles/sophisto.css";</style>

Linking

The following shows the proper way to link to both style sheets:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd ">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
        <head>

<title>NYPL: Your Site Title</title>

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/styles/simple.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />

<style type="text/css" media="all">@import "/styles/sophisto.css";</style>

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="-1" />
<meta http-equiv= "pragma" content="no-cache" />
<meta name="author" content="Your Name or New York Public Library" />
<meta name="robots" content="all" />
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="true" />
<meta name="description" content="Your subject matter described." />
<meta name="keywords" content="your, key, words, here" />

        </head>
« CSS Section Index |CSS Validation »