Other than CSS or Cascading Style Sheet, XSL or Extensible Stylesheet Language is also known as one of the few standardized style sheet language used for web designing. Many have said that XSL is, in some ways, more powerful compared to CSS. So what is XSL and what made it more powerful than the already popular CSS?
XSL Family
XSL began as an attempt to bring the functionality of DSSSL (Document Style Semantics and Specification Language), particularly in the area of print and high-end typesetting, to XML. However, XLS has evolved drastically from its initial design into something very different from its original purpose. Today, according to Web design Philippines specialists, XSL is best used to describe a family of style sheet language used for transforming and rendering XML documents. Some of its most popular XSL are:
XSLT (XSL Transformations)
XSL-FO (XSL Formatting Objects)
Strengths of the XSL over CSS
According to many Web design Philippines experts, the combination of XSLT and XSL-FO creates a very powerful styling language which differs greatly from CSS. Part of the reason is that XSLT is a Turing language, a capability which is non-existent from CSS. This demonstrates a degree of power and flexibility not found in CSS.
Other than being a Turing language, XSLT is also 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 version 2.0 of XSLT, the one with EXSLT extensions, is 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.
Other than the XSLT, the XSL-FO is also known for its strengths over CSS. 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.
Drawbacks of XSL
However, there are several drawbacks to using XSL. One is that the combination of XSLT and XSL-FO, although it creates a powerful style sheet language, is much more complex than CSS. The complexity of XSL-FO is a problem, largely because implementing an FO processor is very difficult. According to many Web design Philippines professionals, 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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