Styling XML with CSS
There are various ways to convert XML code into HTML or otherwise process it in order to display it inside a Web browser.
The two leading browsers (Netscape's and Microsoft's) have completely different ideas about how to do this. If your code accommodates one browser, it can't be displayed sensibly in the other. To make matters worse, there is no standardization in their approaches and no consistency across different versions of the same product. Internet Explorer versions 4 and 5, for example, currently have different expectations and requirements.
What, you might ask, is the point of having a standardized markup language if there are no standards for rendering it? The same thought must have passed through hundreds, even thousands of heads, as it crops up in mine every time I need to build an application to display XML code in yet another proprietary implementation of SGML and XML software.
To solve this, and many other related problems, a large number of attempts have been made to develop a standardized rendering (style) language. Fortunately, XML is able to leverage many of the fruits of these efforts. You can process it using the Document Style Semantics and Specification Language (DSSSL, pronounced dissle), which it inherits from SGML because XML still has a lot of its roots in SGML. You can also use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) from HTML, reflecting that XML and HTML have a common parent in SGML and a common environment in the World Wide Web.
Here you will
- • Briefly review the history of some of the major style languages of importance
- • Learn the basics of the Cascading Style Sheet language and how it can be applied to XML code