A Powerful Styling Language


CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is one of the most popular style sheet languages used in the market today. Almost every web experts knows and use CSS to develop their website. However, other than CSS, a number of web developers have also come to use another style sheet language in their website which is according to many experts, is more powerful than that of CSS. This is XSL.

A powerful language

CSS were known in the past as the "tableless web design" because it allowed web professionals to create websites without the use of tables. Although a number of other style sheet languages were also introduced at that time, such as DSSSL and FOSI, CSS were the only one which possess a unique styling mechanism that made it easier for web experts to design a website.

However, a number of new style sheet languages were also introduced into the market to compliment the demand. One of the few popular ones used today is XSL or the Extensible Stylesheet Language.

According to a number of Web design Philippines professionals, XSL began as an attempt to bring the functionality of DSSSL, particularly in the area of print and high-end typesetting, to XML. However, XSL has evolved drastically from its initial design into something very different from its original purpose. XSL today is mostly known as a family of languages used for transforming and rendering XML documents.

Part of the XSL family include: XSL Transformations (XSLT), an XML language for transforming XML documents; XSL Formatting Objects (XSL-FO), an XML language for specifying the visual formatting of an XML document; XML Path Language (XPath), a non-XML language used by XSLT.

XSLT and XSL-FO vs. CSS

According to many Web design Philippines experts, the combination of XSLT and XSL-FO creates a powerful styling language. XSLT being a Turing complete language, while the XSL-FO being a stand alone document, these two has become known for their capabilities.

Being a Turing complete language, the XSLT demonstrates a degree of power and flexibility not found in CSS while the XSL-FO, according to a number of Web design Philippines experts, ss unlike CSS in that the XSL-FO document stands alone.

However, the combination of XSLT and XSL-FO are much more complex than CSS. The complexity of XSL-FO is also a huge problem for many experts, largely because implementing an FO processor is very difficult.

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