XSL: Powerful Styling Language

CSS or Cascading Style Sheet is a very popular styling language used for designing a website. Almost 80% of web designer and developers make use of CSS as their main styling language. However, other than CSS, there are also a number of styling languages used in today’s modern web designing aesthetics. One example of a popular styling language used today other than CSS is XSL.

Powerful Styling Language

XSL or Extensible Stylesheet Language is a style sheet language which was first founded 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, XSL had evolved drastically from its initial design into something very different from its original purpose. According to web design Philippines experts, the original idea for XSL was to create an XML-based styling language directed towards paged display media. However, the task has been split into two different styling languages, the XSL-FO (XSL Formating Objects) and XSLT (XLT Transformation), which are combined to make one powerful styling language.

Part of the reason why XSL became a powerful styling language is because XSLT itself is a Turing complete language, while its competitor, CSS, is not. This demonstrates a degree of power and flexibility not found in CSS. According to web experts, such as those from web design Philippines companies, 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.

XSL-FO, on the other hand, is unlike CSS in which XSL-FO stands alone. CSS modifies a document that is attached to it, while the XSL-FO document (usually the result of the transformation by XSLT of the original document) contains all of the content to be presented in a purely presentational format.

Disadvantages

Though powerful, the use of both XSLT and XSL-FO requires a lot of skills because of its complexity compared to the use of CSS. According to web design Philippines experts, the combination of XSLT and XSL-FO creates a powerful styling language, though much more complex than CSS.

The complexity of XSL-FO is a problem, largely 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 to write a CSS processor than an FO processor.For more information visit to our site at http://www.myoptimind.com