GNU Website Guidelines
Our goal is to get information to people. Keeping the site design simple helps accomplish that.
Table of Contents
- General Guidelines
- Creating a New Page
- Writing and Editing
- Styling
- Use of Graphics
- Linking Policies
- Technical Tips
- Useful Resources
General Guidelines
Please be considerate of all who access our web pages, and accommodate them, including those who use text-only browsers or old browsers, as well as those with slow connections. We wish to prevent web designs that look great under one version of one browser, and ugly under many others. Of course, please don't install any of the proprietary web browsers available if you don't already use them anyway.
GNU Policies
- The GNU web server has only free software available. We prefer that only free software be used to prepare pages for the GNU web server.
- The GNU website 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 and organizations. If in doubt, ask <gnu@gnu.org>.
- The GNU website gives priority to software covered by either the GNU General Public License or GNU Lesser General Public License.
- Before you take any graphics or text from another website, please ask for permission to use it. It's polite to do so. It is also essential for us to avoid copyright infringement.
- Before adding a link, check that it follows our linking criteria.
- 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 and other messages from the relevant mailing lists.
- Pages should not load CSS from servers other than those run by the FSF.
- Generally, the use of JavaScript is not allowed. Exceptions to this need to be reviewed and approved by the Chief GNUisance on a case-by-case basis.
Copyright Guidelines
- Every page should have a copyright notice. See the boilerplate, referred below.
- Every page should have a notice giving everyone permission to distribute it. If you cannot get such a permission from the author, please discuss the issue with the webmasters before posting it. This applies to CSS as well as to HTML.
- Normally you shouldn't post a page that isn't copyright FSF unless we have permission to modify the version we publish. If you cannot get such a permission from the author, please discuss the issue with the FSF before posting it. This applies to CSS as well as to HTML.
- If ultimately we decide to post a new page we don't have permission to modify, put the text “Posted in 20XX without FSF permission to modify” inside an HTML comment, just after the copyright notice.
- All pages that explain how to do something, such as how to use
certain programs, are documentation. This includes all the pages in
/software/
that describe specific programs. By our principles, documentation must be free. So these pages must carry a free license. If such a page doesn't have a free license, please report the problem to <webmasters@gnu.org>. - For other pages, use the same license as some other page that serves a similar kind of purpose.
HTML Guidelines
- All public pages of the GNU website should be strictly compliant with W3C standards.
Creating a New Page
Naming the file
- To make simultaneous edition of many files easier,
try and give each HTML file a unique and descriptive name; the special filename
index.html
should only be used as a symbolic link, as explained next. - Each directory in the web server tree should have a
symbolic link named
index.html
to the top-level HTML file for that directory. Use the.symlinks
file to handle this. - If you translate your web page (say,
page.html
) in different languages, please name the translationspage.lang.html
—lang
should contain the two-letter language code from ISO 639, and optionally an hyphen followed the two-letter country code given in ISO 3166 (lowercase). For example, the German translation ofnot-ipr.html
should be namednot-ipr.de.html
; the Brazilian Portuguese translation should be namednot-ipr.pt-br.html
.
Doctype and required HTML elements
- Please follow the above mentioned web standards strictly. Don't
neglect required
elements such as
<html>
,<head>
,<title>
and<body>
, etc. when using (X)HTML, and always include the appropriate DTD or Schema reference. This appeases overly pedantic web browsers. - 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 them, and often cause them to incorrectly interpret your markup.
- The
<head>
element should contain this line:<link rel="author" href="mailto:webmasters@gnu.org">
- The first header element,
<h[n]>
, should have its text duplicated at the start of the<title>
element. The latter is used by many browsers in menus like the history and bookmarks lists, as a link to that page. Repeating the main heading in the<title>
ensures that, when users click on an item in these menus, they get a page with the expected heading. 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>
element should include the phrases “GNU Project” and “Free Software Foundation” so the pages can be better indexed by external search engines. The default is to add this at the end:- GNU Project - Free Software Foundation
.
Page footer
- All pages should have a footer. See the boilerplate, referred below.
- The footer should include the copyright and license notices for the
page itself. The copyright and license notices for material that
is part of the page (such as images) should normally be placed in the
main text.
The rules for listing copyright holders and years are detailed in the GNU Maintainers' guide. - The Copyright Infringement Notification is a legal requirement.
- In addition, the footer should have contact info for both the FSF (or responsible party) and the address for bug reports (webmasters for general pages, but project-specific addresses otherwise). The reason to note this in the footer is so the user always finds this information at the same place on each page.
Using our page template
- To help people follow the above guidelines, a page template (or “boilerplate”) is provided for both the main part of the GNU website, and the software projects. Its use is mandatory for new pages in www.gnu.org, and highly recommended for software pages. Please don't start out with an existing page to create a new one; use the original source of the boilerplate instead, and follow the instructions in it.
- The templated pages must follow the XHTML-1.0 guidelines. Well-formedness is essential for translatable pages that need to be converted to POT files by the PO4A/Gettext tools.
- Our server-side includes declare UTF-8 as the character encoding, so using any other encoding is problematic.
Writing and Editing
Page contents
- On pages with dated entries (e.g., /philosophy/latest-articles.html), the newer entries should be first; in other words, preserve reverse chronological order.
- Offer a document in as many formats as the GNU Project has it. For an example, see The GNU Free Documentation License. This lets users get the document in the format most useful to them.
Spelling and punctuation
- English pages should follow the standard American spelling, hyphenation and punctuation conventions.
- Since these conventions are not always very specific, especially as
regards hyphenation and quotes, gnu.org adds its own rules for the sake of
consistency:
- The term “nonfree” is preferred over “non-free”; likewise, “noncommercial” over “non-commercial.”
- In ordinary text, HTML entities
“
“
…”
” and “‘
…’
” are preferred over straight quotes ("..." and '...'). This doesn't apply to script-generated documents. - Where they exist, the double spaces after sentence breaks should be preserved. They enable Emacs sentence commands to do the right thing.
URLs - local links
- Hand-written URLs that refer to other files on www.gnu.org should be
absolute, starting from the root page. That is, paths should start
with
/
(e.g.,/gnu/about-gnu.html
; nothttp://www.gnu.org/gnu/about-gnu.html
, and notabout-gnu.html
). This makes it easier to copy and paste links from other pages. Besides, links likehttp://www.gnu.org/
will be wrong when the visitor uses HTTPS. - 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.
- Don't use just a directory name in a URL; always include the
specific filename. For instance, use
/gnu/gnu.html
, not just/gnu/
. Never useindex.html
in a URL. Both of these are kindnesses to the user, as browsers change the highlighting on a link after it has been visited. If links to a given file use several different URLs, the URLs that haven't been explicitly referenced will not be highlighted as visited. So the user goes to pages he/she has already seen, which is irritating. Also, this eases maintenance of the site as things get moved around. - When embedding static resources, such as videos that are not in
the
www
CVS repository along with the rest of the www.gnu.org pages, it's important that the URL used to embed the asset be a subdomain of gnu.org, so that the Third-party Request Blocker add-on shipped with GNU IceCat would not consider it a third-party asset which it would prevent from being loaded. For example, when embedding videos from FSF campaigns on www.gnu.org, usestatic.gnu.org
rather thanstatic.fsf.org
. Both of these addresses have been set to point to the same machine, so they can be used interchangeably.
URLs - page anchors
- Be sure to omit the filename entirely when linking to an anchor in the same file, and double-check that the anchor actually works.
- Consider others linking to your page when either removing an element
that carries an
id
attribute, or changing anid
. Place the old one on a block element nearby. If there is no suitable element, add one. Here is an example from the Philosophy main page:<!-- please leave both these ID attributes here. ... --> [...] <div id="TOCFreedomOrganizations"> <p id="FreedomOrganizations">We also keep a list of <a href="/links/links.html#FreedomOrganizations">Organizations that Work for Freedom in Computer Development and Electronic Communications</a>.</p> </div>
Please avoid moving the oldid
to a translatable string, unless there is no other way to keep the markup valid. Translators will thank you!
URLs - external links
- Reminder: before adding a link, check that it follows our linking criteria.
- Check whether the linked host supports HTTPS and has a valid certificate
(this is expressed by a locked/green lock on most web browsers). If it
does, and HTTP is also available, preferably use protocol-relative
URLs (e.g.,
//www.example.org
).
URLs - email links
- Place angle brackets around
mailto:
anchors (which will bring up a mail form to fill out and send, if the visitor has installed a standard email client) to clearly distinguish them from hypertext anchors. See RFC 6068 for advanced examples of how to use mailto URIs to specify a subject, the body, etc. - When citing people, place the
mailto:
anchor next to their name, so that the email address is retained in printed copies of the page; for example:- If the person has a website:
<a href="//www.stallman.org/">Richard Stallman</a> <a href="mailto:rms@gnu.org"><rms@gnu.org></a>
… rendered like
-
If the person doesn't have a website:
Richard Stallman <a href="mailto:rms@gnu.org"><rms@gnu.org></a>
… rendered like
Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
- If the person has a website:
Acronyms and abbreviations
- Never use
<acronym>
: HTML 5 obsoletes it in favor of<abbr>
. - Don't use
<abbr>
unless for a really compelling reason. Browsers render it in an ugly way. - When an abbreviation may be unfamiliar to a reader, give its
expansion only the first time it is used in a document.
Example:<abbr title="Expanded Abbreviation">EA</abbr>
orEA (Expanded Abbreviation)
. - For common-enough initialisms, such as GNU, FSF, BSD, RAM, HTML, DVD, and so on, no markup is needed at all. Use your judgment.
Tables and menus
- Please use tables to organize data, not the presentation of the web page.
- 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 sure that reading a whole page left to right doesn't confuse such software. Please follow the W3C web accessibility guidelines to ensure that tables are properly marked for accessibility.
- Some people like to organize links as a menu to the left or right of the main text 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 beginning of the article 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. Providing a “skip link” to the main text is another option (see the table of contents above for an example).
Styling
Styling of templated pages
- Generic styling for desktops and smartphones is provided by
/layout.css
; it covers most of our use cases. - Mobile devices with very limited resources use
/mini.css
. This stylesheet is just the Yahoo User Interface (version 2) reset and base stylesheets, as these devices typically have minimal need for various fonts and no need for fancy layouts. - Printers use
/print.css
. Note that the header, navigation bars and footer (except copyright and license) are unprintable. - In addition to
/layout.css
, some pages have specialized stylesheets:/graphics/graphics.css
for the GNU Art section, and/side-menu.css
for the Malware and Education sections. - If some special styling is needed for a specific page, it should be added
to the page itself in a <style> element, between the SSI directives
that include
header.html
andbanner.html
. If the style applies to a single element, it should normally be added as an attribute. - If you specify any color attribute in the HTML, you should specify all of them that are allowed for that element. 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 stylesheet for this, and not HTML 3.2 (HTML 4 Transitional) deprecated markup.
Other stylesheets
- Historical pages (unmaintained translations for the most part) refer
to
/gnu.css
, which in turn loads/mini.css
, as these pages are usually very basic, plain pages with little or no formatting. - There are dedicated stylesheets for software manuals. The main ones are:
/style.css
;gnulib.css
, which importsstyle.css
and adds a few more definitions; it is used bygendocs.sh
to regenerate Texinfo manuals.
- Translators maintain stylesheets (
/style.lang.css
) that modify/layout.css
according to their own needs. The RTL languages (Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew) use/style.rtl.css
. Please don't forget to update/style.rtl.css
if you make LTR-specific changes tolayout.css
.
Use of Graphics
Caveats
- The use of graphics should be minimized, so pages load fast over slow links, especially animations.
- We do not use background images on our pages, as they make text significantly harder to read.
- In the past, GIFs have had patent problems. However, now that the IBM and Unisys patents (and other patents worldwide that are relevant to LZW compression) have expired, 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 “Why There Are No GIF Files on GNU Web Pages”. Other formats are also allowed, though JPEG is the one most widely recognized by web browsers (avoid JPEG 2000, and be careful with PNG alpha channels; the former is not widely supported, and the latter are not fully supported by some older browsers).
Basic recommendations
Always have a textual alternative for in-line images, to ensure indexability by search engines and accessibility. For instance:
<img src="/graphics/*.jpg" alt=" [DESCRIPTIVE TEXT] " />
We add the non-breaking spaces ( ) and square brackets to separate the DESCRIPTIVE TEXT from adjacent text, and help the user realize that this is a stand-in for an image. The point of using non-breaking spaces rather than normal ones is to make sure they find their way to the translatable strings that are extracted by the PO4A/Gettext tools.
Check that the image doesn't look too big or too small when displayed at its original size, using the browser's default font size.
Adjust image width or height in a style attribute, using scalable units such as
em
or%
; for instance:<img src="/graphics/*.jpg" alt=" [DESCRIPTIVE TEXT] " style="width: 10em; height: auto;" />
This way, the page will look the same if the reader increases or decreases font size.
Link all images that are displayed throughout the website to the relevant page, usually in
/graphics/
. This will allow users to quickly go to pages related to the pictures they are interested in. See the next section for an example.
CSS classes for images
If you are adding a small floating image to a page that uses
layout.css
(the stylesheet for templated pages), you may want to use theimgright
orimgleft
class (defined in the IMAGES section of the stylesheet). This will ensure that the floating direction is reversed if the page is translated into an RTL language.If the image you are adding is 12em wide or more, and the page is templated, you may find it convenient to use one of the responsive
pict
classes that are defined in the IMAGES section oflayout.css
(you can adjust the width in a style attribute if none of the predefined ones fits your needs); for instance:<div class="pict wide" style="width: 25em"> <img src="/graphics/*.jpg" alt=" [DESCRIPTIVE TEXT] " /> </div>
Note that the
div
container is necessary because some browsers (e.g., NetSurf) don't know how to applymax-width
to images.Link all images that are displayed throughout the website to the relevant page, usually in
/graphics/
. This can be done with code similar to this, which corresponds to the image:<p class="imgleft"> <a href="/graphics/agnuhead.html"> <img src="/graphics/gnu-head-sm.jpg" alt=" [Image of the Head of a GNU] " style="width: 8em" /></a> </p>
This will allow users to quickly go to pages related to the pictures they are interested in.
Note: This example also demonstrates that it's a bad idea to place a non-responsive image next to a fixed-width element such as <pre>. Just try to read the HTML code in a narrow window.
graphics.css
has some other layouts.
Linking Policies
One of the most complex aspects of maintaining web pages is following the linking guidelines; however, it's also a very crucial aspect of the job.
We strive to ensure that all pages we promote—all pages which are given links on our site—are friendly to the free software movement. Some pages will obviously not meet such standards; if the site flames the Free Software Foundation, or has no apparent relation to free software and surrounding issues, the link shouldn't be made. Beyond that, however, there are criteria used in determining whether or not it is appropriate to provide a link to a page from ours. They are listed below, in order of descending general importance.
- What's the context of the link?
-
The link's purpose on our site will play a role in determining how strongly it should be judged against the other criteria. Pages hosting GNU projects will be held to the highest standards. Pages about other free software and given high promotion—for example, included in a newsfeed on the main page—are a close second. Links on the philosophy page may be given more leeway in talking about proprietary software; GNU/Linux user group pages should call the system GNU/Linux almost always but are hardly checked on other criteria. Always keep this in mind when deciding how to weigh each aspect of these policies.
- Does the page promote proprietary software?
-
The big point made by the free software movement is that proprietary software presents an ethical dilemma: you cannot agree to such nonfree terms and treat those around you as you would like to be treated. When proprietary software is promoted, people get the impression that it is okay to use it, while we are trying to convince them otherwise. As such, we avoid offering such free advertising, either directly on our site or indirectly through links.
What's tricky about this criteria is the “promotion” point: there's a difference between mentioning proprietary software and making a sales pitch for it. Indeed, the GNU Project website mentions proprietary software throughout, but never gives people the impression that its use does not present ethical problems.
There are two things to keep in mind when determining whether a reference to proprietary software promotes it, or simply mentions it. First, how much information does it offer about the software? Second, how much information is the reader likely to actually gain from this page?
Different pages provide different amounts of information about proprietary software; the more it provides, the more of a problem it poses for us. For example, some pages may link to the primary site for a proprietary software program. Others may describe its functionality in detail. Even the product name given matters; there's a difference between “Windows” and “Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition.”
If the page requires nonfree, nontrivial JavaScript and has serious failures with JavaScript disabled, the link shouldn't be made. Similarly, if the page has embedded Flash that plays an important role, so that a person would be missing something important if the videos do not play, the link should not be made.
The subject of the reference will also play a role in determining how problematic a reference is. If the software is already very popular, it's unlikely that a basic mention of it will be news to the reader. Some examples of proprietary software which are common enough to be considered “well-known” are major operating systems (Windows, Mac OS, Sun OS, HP-UX) and primary common applications such as Office, Internet Explorer, Photoshop, Acrobat Reader, and Flash.
GNU software project pages feel the full force of this policy. Proprietary software should only be mentioned when the GNU software provides support for it, or to compare it against the features of well-known proprietary software. For example, the following text — and not much else — would be acceptable:
w3m is a text-only web browser which can be used from GNU Emacs via emacs-w3m, replacing proprietary web browsers like Internet Explorer. It can run on all platforms GNU Emacs runs on, including GNU/Linux, proprietary Unix systems, and Windows.
Links which appear in other areas, such as the testimonials or philosophy pages, as well as links to user groups may discuss such software in greater detail, but links and other methods of encouragement to “learn more” should still be avoided.
- How does the page compare free software to open source?
-
Almost all pages which have links on our site should, at the very least, treat free software and open source equally. Failure to do so—whether it be by omitting free software or by implying that open source is superior—is usually unacceptable. GNU software project pages should have little mention of open source. The GNOME page used to provide a good example of a tactful way to do it:
GNOME is part of the GNU Project, and is free software (sometimes referred to as open source software).
Any exceptions to this rule should be apparent from the context. For instance, user groups pages may talk in greater detail about open source; we state on the user groups page,
As with our links page, the FSF is not responsible for the contents of other websites, or how up-to-date their information is.
- How does the page treat the GNU Project?
-
Pages which we link to should treat the GNU Project well. The primary thing to look out for in this regard is whether the page calls the system GNU/Linux or just “Linux”. GNU software project and user group pages should almost never, if ever, fail to do this. Again, exceptions for other pages should be apparent from context.
That said, certain parts of a page should not be considered against these criteria. For example, suppose we were to make a link to a page on a free software news site. Any advertisements or reader comments attached to the article would not be considered when determining whether it met or linking guidelines, since they're understood to be the opinion of their individual authors. Similarly, on user group pages, the contents of forums and wiki pages should not hold weight in these regards.
Finally, some sites are understood to always have exception with most of these guidelines. These sites are usually about issues which are important, but somewhat peripheral, to the free software movement. Several times we have linked to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's site, even though they encourage the use of Flash and talked exclusively about open source software. It's generally understood that since these pages are not primarily about free software, the policies do not hold full force for them.
As a final explanation:
Even for making links from www.gnu.org, we do not require that people call the system GNU/Linux or use the term “free software” rather than “open source”. We do, however, require that they not promote any nonfree software. — RMS
If all this seems complicated, that's because, unfortunately, it is. Don't worry; a knack for it comes with time and experience. You may mis-evaluate a few pages as you're learning to get a feel for what's acceptable and what isn't; please don't hesitate to get a second opinion from a more experienced webmaster, or someone in charge like the Chief Webmaster or RMS. New exceptions will always come up; keep an open mind to that possibility and be ready to handle them properly.
Technical Tips
Basic CVS commands
For the offline reference manual, execute info cvs.
-
Before the initial checkout, set the environment variable CVS_RSH=ssh.
-
If you have write access to the main repository of www.gnu.org, check it out with your Savannah login username:
cvs -z3 -d:ext:username@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/web/www co www
You will get a working directory,
www
, with the same structure as our main website. -
If you don't have write access to the main repository, you can still check it out anonymously:
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/web/www co www
-
Check out the web repository of the fooproject:
cvs -z3 -d:ext:username@cvs.savannah.gnu.org:/web/fooproject \ co fooproject
You will get a working directory,
fooproject
, with the same structure as thewww/software/fooproject
subdirectory. Note, however, that the fooproject and main repositories are independent, so the working directories can be anywhere in your filesystem.Webmasters, please read Web pages for official GNU software before committing anything to the web repository of a software project.
-
Add a file or directory:
cvs add foo
-
Update before you edit a file:
cvs update -P foo
-
Check the changes you are going to commit:
cvs diff -U2 foo
-
Perform the commit (no need for cvs add if the file is already in the repository):
cvs commit foo
This will open a text editor where you should enter a log message. The commit will occur upon saving the message.
Without being excessively verbose, log messages should describe as clearly as possible the nature of the commit, including any related ticket numbers from RT to allow future historians to understand why your changes were made.
Whenever possible, changes to multiple files that share the same log message should be bundled in one commit. Do not bundle multiple unrelated changes in one commit.
The changes (except to .symlinks files) should be visible on www.gnu.org within minutes.
For further details on CVS, such as reverting to a previous version, or
looking at the diff
output of a particular change, see the CVS documentation.
Symbolic links
Since CVS is not able to handle symbolic links directly, a separate mechanism has been implemented to allow webmasters to maintain symbolic links, as follows. (Actual symbolic links are no longer created on www.gnu.org; mod_rewrite rules are used instead. But we'll keep this discussion talking about symlinks since it is easier to understand that way.)
Being a symlink means that relative links from the linked page may break when the symlink jumps to a different directory.
Special files, named .symlinks
, when committed
to the CVS tree, are interpreted as specifications to build
symbolic links.
Each symbolic link specification from the .symlinks file is honored,
i.e., the symbolic link is created if it does not exist yet. If a
symbolic link is found in the directory and is not listed in the
.symlinks file, it is removed.
The .symlinks
files obey the ln -s
format,
as described below:
- Lines starting with a sharp sign (“#”) are ignored.
- Lines that do not contain two strings separated by white space are silently ignored.
Here is an example of .symlinks
:
# Make a link named l.html to a target t.html. # Strictly equivalent to ln -s t.html l.html: t.html l.html
On each line the first file name must be a relative path name to an
existing file. The second file name may not contain any slash; it is the
name of the symbolic link to be created in the present directory. For
instance, if a page named dir.html
exists in the
/dir
directory, and index.html
does not exist,
/dir/.symlinks
should contain a line like this:
dir.html index.html
The ln -s
analogy accounts for only part of the story.
Nowadays, the symlinks are converted to rewrite directives which are
part of the server configuration [*].
This allows for a lot of flexibility: directories can be redirected as
well as single files, and the target can be on another website. The
server treats external redirections as “permanent,” meaning
that it replaces the requested URL with the target. Thus, what is shown
in the URL bar of the browser is the actual location of the document.
A peculiarity of this method is that a single HTML entry in
.symlinks
defines links to all possible translations that
follow our naming
conventions. This makes it impossible to use
symlinks to redirect to and from HTML files whose names look like
translations, that is, page.ll.html
or
page.ll-cc.html
, where
ll and cc are two-letter codes, as seen in
the Filenames section.
When you need such redirections, use the htaccess mechanism.
In the other cases (that is, nearly all cases), the symlinks method is preferred, as it takes precedence over htaccess. If you are not familiar with it, please ask for help on <webmasters@gnu.org>.
[*] The handling of symlinks happens on www.gnu.org via a cron job that runs twice an hour. Webmasters do not have access to it.
.htaccess and redirections
You may want an actual redirection in some cases. You can do this
either in the top-level control file .htaccess
, or by using
something like this as the file to be redirected:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=https://www.gnu.org/target">
Scripts
A description of scripts and
software used on www.gnu.org is available. Please read it before
writing any scripts, and also update it as needed if you have write
access to www
.
System administrators
The system administrators for GNU change from time to time. Please email the sysadmin list <sysadmin@gnu.org> rather than an individual, unless you have a specific reason to do so.
Useful Resources
External resources
This section contains references managed by third parties.
- We follow the guidelines of the Best Viewed with Any Browser campaign.
- Basic info on the web and its technical specifications can be found at The World Wide Web Consortium.
- The GNU web server follows the w3.org Style Guide.
- Use of WCAG 2.1 helps ensure accessibility for a wide range of people with disabilities.
Internal resources
This section contains references managed by us.
- The GNU Website Guidelines (this page);
- Guidelines for Web Page Creation at www.gnu.org;
- Appendix B Tips and Hints, and other style tips in the Texinfo Manual;
- GNU Accessibility Statement;
- GNU Webmastering Guidelines;
- Guide to translating GNU web pages into other languages;
- Tips for webmasters to make translators' job easier;
- Documentation for Savannah, the SourceForge clone dedicated to the GNU Project;
-
README for the
/prep/gnumaint/
directory (those files are primarily used by GNU maintainer administrators, and occasionally by GNU webmasters, to update the/*/allgnupkgs.html
files inwww
); - How to help with our web server.