In the long history of web design practices, the use of style sheet languages such as Cascading Style Sheet, or CSS, have greatly revolutionized the way professionals create and design websites. It didn't only made designing easier, it also made it easier for web professionals to edit their web pages efficiently and systematically. However, before style sheet languages became popular, the use of tables and spacers were known to be the only way for graphic artists to control every element found in a website.
The start of website design
The Internet weren't always the medium for mass media which we have grown to know. Internet in the past were used for the sole purpose of exchanging information and research notes simultaneously all over the world. However, when the Internet expanded to accommodate a more wider media, particularly in advertising and marketing, people sought ways on how to control the elements found in the website, to make it look more inviting from a user's perspective.
One of the many methods used by graphic artists to control the elements found in the a web page is through the use of tables. Tables and spacers, which are usually transparent single pixel GIF images with explicitly specified width and height, have been heavily used in web pages to control its visual appearance. However, although it made websites more inviting and organized, the use of tables and spacers caused several problems with a website's accessibility.
Unlike in today's Internet connections, which could go to as high as 45Mbps, Internet speed in the past could only go as high as a dial-up does. The use of tables and spacers made it harder for people to open websites because tables made websites larger. Many Web pages have been designed with tables nested within tables, resulting in large HTML documents which use more bandwidth than documents with simpler formatting.
According to many Web design Philippines experts, when a table-based layout is linearized, for example when being parsed by a screen reader or a search engine, the resulting order of the content can be somewhat jumbled and confusing.
Eventually, the use of the World Wide Web steadily decreased, and people now sought ways on how to manipulate the elements within a web page without having to use tables. This is also the time that tableless website design became a popular idea.
The introduction of the style sheet language
Style sheet languages were then introduced into the market that promised to offer a way for graphic designers and web professionals to create websites without having to use tables and spacers. Before CSS was introduced in the market, several other computer languages were used, such as the DSSSL and FOSI.
DSSSL or Document Style Semantics and Specification Language is a computer language firstly used for specifying stylesheets for SGML which was eventually converted for XML. SGML contains information in a machine-readable but not very human-readable format. A "stylesheet" is used to present the information stored in SGML in a more pleasing or accessible way. This is the reason why it was eventually used in XML as an alternative to the use of tables. And similar to DSSSL si FOSI. FOSI or Formatting Output Specification Instance is also a computer language used for SGML which was also eventually used for XML.
Although DSSSL and FOSI became popular as an alternative to tables and spacers, many people still saw it unfitting. Eventually, CSS was introduced into the market which gave more effective means for controlling a web page's visual appearance. The advantage of using CSS over DSSSL and FOSI is that CSS allowed a document's style to be influenced by multiple style sheets.
According to Web design Philippines specialists, one style sheet could inherit or "cascade" from another, permitting a mixture of stylistic preferences controlled equally by the site designer and user. CSS is the only style sheet language called as the "Tableless website design".
Other style sheet language used in the market
Other than CSS, DSSSL, and FOSI, there have also been other style sheet languages introduced in the web. XSL, CSS' main competitor in the market, is also one of the most popularly used style sheet language in the market. Similar to CSS, XSL is also a standard style sheet language, along with DSSSL. However, although CSS is known as the most popular style sheet language used today in the market, many have said that XSL holds features which is not found in CSS.
Advantage of XSL from CSS
XSL or Extensible Stylesheet Language is a term used to define a family of style sheet languages. Some of its most popular style sheet languages are the XSL-FO or XSL Formatting Objects and the XSLT or XSL Transformations.
According to many Web design Philippines experts, when these two types of XSL, the XSLT and XSL-FO, are combined, it creates a powerful styling language. XSLT, being a Turing language, demonstrates a power and flexibility not found in CSS. And lastly, 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.
Another is that compared to CSS, 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. It has a wide range of specification options with regard to paged formatting and higher-quality typesetting.
Disadvantage of XSL from CSS
However, although the combination of XSLT and XSL-FO creates a powerful styling language, many found it much more complex than CSS. The complexity of XSL-FO is also a problem. This is because implementing an FO processor is very difficult. 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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