Non-Standardized Style Sheet Languages



CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) are considered as the standard style sheet languages used in web development. However, other than CSS and XSL, there has also been other style sheet languages used in the industry. These include JavaScript Style Sheets (JSSS), Formatting Output Specification Instance (FOSI), and Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets (Sass). Unlike CSS and XSL, these style sheet languages are non-standardized, meaning few browsers support these languages.

JavaScript Style Sheets (JSSS)

JavaScript Style Sheets or JSSS is a style sheet language propose by Netscape Communications Corporation in 1996 to provide facilities for defining the presentation of webpages. According to many Web design Philippines experts, it was the direct competition of CSS in the style sheet language market. However, unlike CSS, the technology was never accepted as a formal standard and it never gained much acceptance in the market. Only Netscape Communicator 4 supported JSSS, with the rival Internet Explorer web browser choosing not to implement the technology.

Eventually, Netscape topped promoting JSSS, instead focusing on the rival CSS standard, which was also supported by Internet Explorer and had much wider industry acceptance. Soon, Netscape 6 (released in 2000), dropped support for JSSS. According to Web design Philippines specialists, it now remains little more than a historical footnote, with many Web developers not even being aware of its existence.

However, many people have suggested that JSSS is in some ways more powerful and in some ways less powerful than CSS. Although the language lacks the various CSS selector features, supporting only a simple tag name selector, since it is written using a complete programming language, stylesheets can include highly complex dynamic calculations and conditional processing. Because of this JSSS was often used in the creation of DHTML.

Formatting Output Specification Instance (FOSI)

A style sheet language used in the market for Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) which eventually turned their attention to XML. FOSI stylesheets are themselves written in SGML, an approach that would later be adopted by XSL. According to many Web design Philippines experts, FOSI was developed by the US Department of Defense to control the pagination and layout of SGML and XML technical data.

Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets (Sass)

A style sheet language which is best described as a meta-language on top of CSS, and is meant to abstract CSS code and create simpler stylesheet files. Designed by Hampton Catlin and developed by Nathan Weizenbaum, both are still continuing o extend Sass with SassScript, a Turing Complete scripting language used in Sass files.

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