W3C Validation
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.
Images for Sinorcaish
The version of Sinorcaish available from the Open Source Web Design group does not contain any graphical images.
If you would like some appropriate sample images that you can use in your own documents, you should download the version available from the official Sinorcaish web site.
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, tables are not used for visual formatting. In addition, the amount of “boilerplate” markup is kept to a minimum.
Full step-by-step instructions are included to make it easy for you to create your own logo image similar to the one used by Sinorcaish.
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 (or even Triple-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.
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 as it existed at the time.
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-13 9780596005252). This book is simply one of the best in its class! A Third Edition is now available…
Sinorcaish is being used successfully on web sites all over the world, as illustrated by just some of the responses received by e-mail (reproduced with permission):
“Just saw your Sinorcaish template on OSWD and I must say that it’s brilliant. You’ve obviously put a lot of work into it, and it really shows. It looks great, is functional and the tutorial is an excellent inclusion.” — Haran Sivakumaran, designer of Sinorca, 12th December, 2004 (the day Sinorcaish was accepted by the Open Source Web Design group!)
“1st i want to thank u for this wonderful template. its a
great work and will surely simplify my web-design work… again,
thank you kindly for your work — u made an html-hater like
myself to be able to make a nice looking pages, and this my friend, is
not an easy task ;)”
— Elia Yehuda, User
Contributions.org, 29th December, 2004.
“I was just admiring all the work you put into the Sinorcaish CSS on the OSWD server and your own server. I used Sinorca CSS for our small company web site…” — David Parker, Uplifting Solutions, 10th January, 2005.
“I’ve been looking all over the web for a starting point for my new site until I found oswd.org. I narrowed it down to a half dozen templates and then had my family make the final choice. Sinorcaish was the winner. Thanks for making it available. You saved me a ton of work.” — Jim Chambers, 25th January, 2005.
“I want to thank you for providing the Sinorcaish style sheets. I’ve never worked with style sheets before and I’m using yours as a learning tool, as well as for the web pages for my online documents. Thanks again for making it open source.” — Jane Gilliam, 29th January, 2005.
“I was about to redesign a website when I came to your Sinorcaish which I’m using now for the relaunch. It is really great!” — Max Sievers, Fachschaft Biologie, Technische Universität Darmstadt, 9th March, 2005.
“on OSWD i found your design Sinorcaish and i like it very much! i’m still a beginner in design of homepages, but with your example i will learn more and more how to make this things.” — Markus von Däniken, 30th March, 2005.
“Just wanted to say hi and thank you very much for an excellent stylesheet. It’s not only the style as such but also the very profound and comprehensive documentation you have written which made the conversion from my old web page to the new style a matter of a few hours only (most time went into creating the shadowed logo with GIMP…)” — Sven Krahn, 2nd April, 2005.
“I found your design on OSWD website and I find it the most suitable for my needs among the others. I basically need a design idea for a web admin system I am working on, it’s an intranet thing for administring our business ecc. Yours really has some good usability standards and it’s pretty stylish.” — Maxim Maletsky, 11th May, 2005.
“I liked the template and the modifications you made on the original design of Haran. Thank you for the effort and making it such a good template.” — Sanjay Saha, 21st June, 2005.
“I am a registered nurse and in a graduate program at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, USA… I am not a professional web designer and will not be one. I like your template because of the usability considerations and the ample documentation you include (very useful for us novices) and appreciate all your hard work.” — Kenneth Bavier, 22nd June, 2005.
“Just wanted to say thanks for your Sinorcaish stylesheet which I have found on OSWD. It is by far the best documented stylesheet at their website and I was just overwhelmed by all your instructions how to use it, specialities to it, plus a brief html-sampler. Wow! You made it easy to get my head around CSS, which I have never worked with before.” — Johann Balheim, 9th July, 2005.
“I have literally looking for months for a style that was both pleasing to look at and easy to use. Your Sinorcaish is both. I have put it in use at my website.” — Charlie Smith, Smith Data Processing Services, 10th January, 2006.
“I just finished reading the instruction page you have
written for the latest version of Sinorcaish (downloaded from Open
[Source] Web Design a few days ago), and I am truly impressed…
I could not very well ignore the opportunity to acknowledge this
amazing contribution to the world of web design and publishing.
Thank you for demonstrating so thoroughly what can and should be
accomplished with the web standards we have today (as opposed to
waiting for some distant future of consistent user agent support for
these definitions), and thank you additionally for reminding me what
humility is :-).”
— Seth Steben, 29th January, 2006.
“Long time I looked for a template for my site based on CMS. I have found the Sinorcaish Stylesheet, and I admired with unique typographics of this fine template. It is magic. This template is made with huge professionalism. Even if someone will not use it in the work, all should look at this template because it is a classical example.” “Sinorcaish — это уникальная авторская работа. Спасибо.” — Dmitry Surrentchick, 22nd July, 2006.
“The main reason for [writing] is to let you know that I (an old technically savvy geek with 40+ years of verifiable experience in the business) am quite impressed with the quality of the workmanship used in the design of this template. Very well done!” — Beryl Shmuel, 13th October, 2006.
The Sinorcaish stylesheet was created by John Zaitseff and submitted to the Open Source Web Design group in December, 2004; it was last updated in March, 2007. 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, to the sample document and to the logo image instructions. 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!