Date added: 2004-11-30 | Hits: 604 | Rating: (0)

XHTML Strict Valid CSS HTML Templates 2 Columns Fluid Width CSS-Based Layout

Welcome to the Sinorcaish stylesheet! This stylesheet gives your web site an attractive, clean-look interface while maintaining a separation of style and content to the greatest possible extent. This allows you to concentrate on the structure and content of your documents, safe in the knowledge that the Sinorcaish stylesheet will do a great job of presenting them to the rest of the world.

Features and Benefits

The Sinorcaish stylesheet was designed with you, the web site document writer, in mind:

• The Sinorcaish distribution comes with an extensive sample document that illustrates many of the features of this stylesheet. This eliminates the guess-work of asking “how do I do that?” in creating top-quality documents.

• A simple template makes writing your own documents relatively painless.

• As much as possible, style has been separated from content; for example, not a single table is used for visual formatting. In addition, the amount of “boilerplate” markup is kept to a minimum.

• Sinorcaish conforms to the XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.1 Web standards. This, along with an emphasis on structure and content, allows you to meet the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 at Level Double-A with ease.

• Sinorcaish has been tested under the latest versions of Mozilla Firefox, Konqueror, Safari, Opera, Lynx and Internet Explorer. You can rest assured that your documents will look their best in any modern browser.

Note: Checking for CSS 2.1 conformance currently returns some rather unusual parse errors. This is actually a problem with the W3 CSS Validation Service and has been reported as bug 948. Checking the individual CSS files works as expected.

Inspiration and Acknowledgements

The design of Sinorcaish was influenced by Sinorca, implemented by Haran Sivakumaran. Sinorca, in turn, was based on the look-and-feel of the Acronis company web site.

Although the Sinorca stylesheet is quite good, it is rather limited: it does not allow floating text boxes, does not really cater for computer-oriented documentation (which requires appropriate styling for elements like <code>, <kbd> and <pre>), and completely ignores (data) tables and many other XHTML elements. These limitations, along with the desire to update parts of the visual interface, led to Sinorcaish: a complete redesign and reimplementation of the Acronis look-and-feel.

The Sinorcaish stylesheet could not have been designed without Eric Meyer’s excellent book, Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide (Second Edition), published by O’Reilly (ISBN 0-596-00525-3). This book is simply one of the best in its class!

The Final Word

The Sinorcaish stylesheet was created by John Zaitseff and submitted to the Open Source Web Design group in December, 2004. You should consult the official Sinorcaish web site for updated style sheets and associated images.

You may freely redistribute and/or modify the Sinorcaish CSS stylesheet files (sinorcaish-screen.css and sinorcaish-print.css) on the condition that the original copyright notice is preserved. The same condition applies to this overview document, as well as to the sample document. You may redistribute and/or modify the associated template file without any such restriction. These conditions may be waived; write to John Zaitseff for details.

Your comments, suggestions, corrections and enhancements are always warmly welcomed! Please send these by e-mail to J.Zaitseff@zap.org.au. In addition, you are encouraged to send a short note to the same address should you use this stylesheet in one of your own web sites. Happy coding!