A Style Sheet Language More Powerful Than CSS



Cascading Style Sheet or CSS is considered by many web professionals as one of the most successful style sheet language introduced for website design. It was the style sheet language that revolutionized the way graphic designers design a website without the use of tables and spacers. This is the reason why CSS is also known as the "tableless website design" because it was the perfect solution for the problem that raised when using tables.

However, other than CSS, several other style sheet languages have also been introduced in the market. And one of the most highly recognized style sheet language used in the market today is XSL. According to many web professionals, including those from Web design Philippines companies, XSL offers many features and capabilities which CSS lacks. So what is XSL?

XSL Family

XSL or Extensible Stylesheet Language was a style sheet language introduced to bring the functionality of another style sheet language (which is DSSSL) to XML. However, XSL evolved from its initial design and formed a family of different style sheet language. XSL is now a is term widely used to define a family of style sheet languages. Some of its most notable languages are the XSLT (or XSL Transformations) and XSL-FO (or XSL Formatting Objects).

According to many professionals, such as those from Web design Philippines companies, the combination of XSLT and XSL-FO can create a very powerful style sheet language unlike that of what CSS can offer. One reason for this is that XSLT is, itself, a Turing language. This demonstrates a a degree of power and flexibility not found in CSS.

Many have also cited that XSLT is capable of creating content, such as automatically creating a table of contents just from chapters in a book, or removing/selecting content, such as only generating a glossary from a book. In XSLT version 2.0, XSLT is said to be capable of generating multiple documents as well, such as dividing the chapters in a book into their own individual pages. By contrast, a CSS can only selectively remove content by not displaying it.

Another strength of XSL from CSS is with XSL-FO. According to many Web design Philippines specialists, XSL-FO is a stand alone document which CSS is not. CSS modifies a document that attached to it, while the XSL-FO document contains all of the content to be presented in a purely presentational format. However, there have also been some disadvantages to using XSL.

Disadvantages

One disadvantage of combining XSLT and XSL-FO is it requires more skills compared to using CSS because of its complexity. The complexity of XSL-FO is also a huge problem, largely because implementing an FO processor is very difficult. According to many Web design Philippines specialists, CSS implementations in web browsers are still not entirely compatible with one another, and it is much simpler than writing an FO processor.

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