Standardized And Non - Standardized Style Sheet Languages



CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is considered as one of the most popular of style sheet languages used in web development. It was considered as the perfect jump from the use of tables to tableless web design. However, other than CSS, there are also other style sheet languages used in the market, some gained the same popularity as CSS, while some have been discontinued.

Style Sheet Languages

There are two types of style sheet languages. According to Web design Philippines specialists, there are the standardized style sheet language which is now widely used in the market, such as CSS, and the non-standardized style sheet languages which are only used for specific browsers. The list of standardized style sheet languages include:

Document Style Semantics and Specification Language (DSSSL)

Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL)

Document Style Semantics and Specification Language (DSSSL) is a computer language for specifying stylesheets for SGML documents, based on a subset of the Scheme programming language. A "stylesheet" is used to present the information stored in SGML in a more pleasing or accessible way. DSSSL can convert to a wide range of formats, including RTF, HTML, and LaTeX. In parallel with the move from SGML to XML, the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is gradually replacing DSSSL. However, many of the concepts used in XSL originated with DSSSL.

The term Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is used to refer to a family of languages used for transforming and rendering XML documents. One of its most prominent style sheet language is the XSL Formatting Objects or 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 (the result of the transformation by XSLT of the original document) contains all of the content to be presented in a purely presentational format.

According to Web design Philippines experts, XSL-FO also has a wide range of specification options with regard to paged formatting and higher-quality typesetting. However, it does not specify the pages themselves.

Here is the list of the non-standardized style sheet languages:

JavaScript Style Sheets (JSSS) - A style sheet language technology proposed by Netscape Communications Corporation in 1996 to provide facilities for defining the presentation of webpages. It was an alternative to the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) technology. Although it was proposed by Netscape, it was eventually dropped out. According to Web design Philippines experts, it now remains little more than a historical footnote, with many Web developers not even being aware of its existence.

Formatting Output Specification Instance (FOSI) - A stylesheet language for SGML and, later, XML. FOSI stylesheets are themselves written in SGML, an approach that would later be adopted by XSL.

Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets (Sass) - A stylesheet language initially designed by Hampton Catlin and developed by Nathan Weizenbaum. It is best described as a meta-language on top of CSS, and is meant to abstract CSS code and create simpler stylesheet files.

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