CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, is one of the most popular types of style sheet languages used by many web developers today. Part of what made it popular is its flexibility in almost all types of browsers in the market, even in mobile phones. However, other than CSS, there is also another type of style sheet language which is also as widely used as CSS. This is the Extensible Stylesheet Language or XSL.
Comparison of CSS and XSL
The two primary stylesheet languages are Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL). While they are both called stylesheet languages, they have very different purposes and ways of going about their tasks. So what are its differences?
CSS
CSS is designed around styling HTML and XML (including XHTML) documents. It was created for that purpose. It uses a special, non-XML syntax for defining the styling information for the various elements of the document that it styles. In version 2.1, CSS were then used popularly for styling documents that are to be shown on "screen media". According to Web design Philippines experts, this means that media displayed as a single page (possibly with hyperlinks) has a fixed horizontal width but a virtually unlimited vertical height.
However, styling paged media involves a variety of complexities that screen media does not. Since CSS was designed originally for screen media, its paged facilities are lacking. In CSS version 3.0, users are provided with new features that allow CSS to more adequately style documents for paged display.
XSL
According to many Web design Philippines experts, XSL has evolved drastically from its initial design into something very different from its original purpose. The original idea for XSL was to create an XML-based styling language directed towards paged display media. The mechanism they used to accomplish this task was to divide the process into two distinct steps.
First, the XML document would be transformed into an intermediate form. The process for performing this transformation would be governed by the XSL stylesheet, as defined by the XSL specification. The result of this transformation would be an XML document in an intermediate language, known as XSL-FO.
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 document contains all of the content to be presented in a purely presentational format. Accordig to many Web design Philippines experts, it has a wide range of specification options with regard to paged formatting and higher-quality typesetting.