W3C publishes first draft of CSS Linked Parameters Module
The World Wide Web Consortium has published a first draft of a CSS specification that would let websites pass styling values into linked resources such as SVG images.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published a First Public Working Draft of the CSS Linked Parameters Module Level 1.
The draft was published by the CSS Working Group on 14 July 2026. Its editors are Tab Atkins-Bittner of Google, Daniel Holbert of Mozilla and Jonathan Watt of Mozilla.
CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is used to describe how structured documents such as HTML and XML are displayed on screen, on paper or in other formats.
The new draft introduces ‘CSS link parameters’. These would allow a web page to pass CSS values into linked resources, such as external SVG images. The linked resource could then use those values as CSS custom environment variables.
In practice, this would make it easier to reuse SVG images as templates. For example, an external SVG icon could adapt to a website’s theme colour without the site having to create and load several different versions of the same image.
The draft describes three ways to set a link parameter: through the new link-parameters CSS property, through a special fragment in the URL, or through a param() argument inside the CSS url() function.
W3C says the feature gives external SVG images some of the styling flexibility that inline SVG images already have, while keeping the resource separate.
The document is still an early draft. W3C notes that publication as a First Public Working Draft does not mean endorsement by W3C or its members, and that the specification may still be changed, replaced or withdrawn.
