Docutils | Overview | About | Users | Reference | Developers

Docutils HTML writers

html

front-end:

rst2html

The writer name html is an alias for the default Docutils HTML writer.

The default may change with the development of HTML, browsers, Docutils, and the web. Currently, html is mapped to html4css1, it will become an alias for html5 in Docutils 2.0.

html4css1

aliases:

html4, html

front-ends:

rst2html4, rst2html

config:

[html4css1 writer]

The HTML Writer module, docutils/writers/html4css1.py, was the first Docutils writer and up to release 0.13 the only official HTML writer.

The output conforms to the XHTML 1 Transitional specification. It does not validate as HTML 4.01 Transitional due to the closing of empty tags required in XML but not allowed in HTML 4. However, the output follows the HTML Compatibility Guidelines for proper rendering on most HTML user agents.

Correct rendering depends on a CSS style sheet. A reference style sheet, html4css1.css, is provided and used by default.

To support the Internet Explorer (with a market share of about 90% around 2002, the time this writer was written), documents contain some hard-coded formatting hints and are tagged as "text/html" (instead of "application/xhtml+xml"). [1]

pep_html

front-end:

docutils --reader=pep --writer=pep_html

config:

[pep_html writer]

This is a special writer for the generation of Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs). It inherits from html4css1 and adds some PEP-specific options, a style sheet and template. It works best in combination with the specialised "pep_html" reader.

s5_html

alias:

s5

front-end:

rst2s5

config:

[s5_html writer]

The s5 writer inherits from html4css1. It produces XHTML for use with S5, the “Simple Standards-based Slide Show System” by Eric Meyer. See Easy Slide Shows With reST & S5 for details.

html5

aliases:

html5_polyglot

front-end:

rst2html5

config:

[html5 writer]

The html5_polyglot writer generates polyglot HTML [2] output, valid XML [3] that is compatible with HTML5. New features and elements are used if they are widely supported. See the HTML5 test page (and the sources html5-features.txt and html5-text-level-tags.txt) for further differences to the html4css1 writer.

There is no hard-coded formatting information in the HTML document. Correct rendering of elements not directly supported by HTML depends on a CSS style sheet. The provided style sheet minimal.css defines required styling rules; plain.css and responsive.css add optional rules for better legibility. Adaption of the layout is possible with custom style sheets. [3]

New in Docutils 0.13

Overview

name

aliases

front-end

HTML version

CSS version

html4css1

html4, html

rst2html4, rst2html

XHTML 1 Transitional

CSS 1

pep_html

rstpep2html

XHTML 1 Transitional

CSS 1

s5_html

s5

rst2s5

XHTML 1 Transitional

CSS 1

html5_polyglot

html5

rst2html5

HTML5

CSS 3

For additional alternatives, see the Docutils link list and the sandbox.

References

HTML5

HTML5, A vocabulary and associated APIs for HTML and XHTML, W3C Recommendation, 28 October 2014. https://www.w3.org/TR/2014/REC-html5-20141028/

XHTML 1.1

XHTML™ 1.1 - Module-based XHTML - Second Edition, W3C Recommendation, 23 November 2010. https://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/

XHTML 1 Transitional

Transitional version of: XHTML™ 1.0 The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (Second Edition), A Reformulation of HTML 4 in XML 1.0, W3C Recommendation, 26 January 2000, revised 1 August 2002. https://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/

XHTML Basic

XHTML™ Basic 1.1 - Second Edition, W3C Recommendation, 23 November 2010. https://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-basic/

HTML 4.01 Transitional

Transitional version of: HTML 4.01 Specification, W3C Recommendation 24 December 1999. https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/

CSS Level 1:

The features defined in the CSS1 specification, but using the syntax and definitions in the CSS 2.1 specification.

CSS 2.1 Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 Revision 1 (CSS 2.1) Specification,

W3C Recommendation 07 June 2011. https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/

CSS 3:

CSS Level 3 builds on CSS Level 2 module by module, using the CSS2.1 specification as its core.

Specifications: https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/specs.en.html

Validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/