CSS is considered by many as the most popular style sheet language used in the industry. However, aside from CSS, there have also been other style sheet languages in the market which many have said to hold features which is not found in CSS. One example is the use of XSL style sheet language. So what is XSL and what does it hold which makes it better than CSS?
What is XSL
XSL or Extensible Stylesheet Language has evolved drastically from its initial design into something very different from its original purpose. The term is now widely used to define a family of languages used for transforming and rendering XML documents. There are currently three parts of XSL which was split from the original language. These 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, and also available for use in non-XSLT contexts, for addressing the parts of an XML document.
According to many Web design Philippines specialists, the combination of XSLT and XSL-FO creates a powerful styling language even with CSS. Compared to CSS, XSLT is a Turing complete language, which demonstrates a degree of power and flexibility not found in CSS. Also, 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.
The XSL-FO is also known for its advantages. XSL-FO is unlike CSS in that the XSL-FO document stands alone. CSS modifies a document that attached to it, while the XSL-FO documentcontains all of the content to be presented in a purely presentational format. According to many Web design Philippines specialists, it also has a wide range of specification options with regard to paged formatting and higher-quality typesetting.
Disadvantages
according to many Web design Philippines specialists, XSLT is much more complex than that of CSS. Other than the XSLT, the complexity of XSL-FO is also a problem, largely because implementing an FO processor is very difficult. Although implementing CSS implementations in web browsers are still not entirely compatible with one another, many have cited that it is much simpler than writing an FO processor.
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