Friday, April 15, 2011

Popular and Unpopular Style Sheet Languages

CSS
or Cascading Style Sheets is one of the most recognized languages used for styling a website. It is also known in the industry as “tableless web design” for it is one of the few styling languages which gave designers and developers simplicity in web designing, allowing them to focus more on designing rather than coding.

However, a number of styling languages were also introduced and in the past even before CSS was developed, while others were founded to compete with CSS or to improve its simplicity. Here are some of the most recognized styling languages used in the past and in today’s modern web development trends.

DSSSL and FOSI
Both type of styling languages were introduced at the time when tableless web design was in-demand. DSSSL or Document Style Semantics and Specification Language and FOSI or Formatting Output Specification Instance are types of styling languages which was developed for use in SGML or Standard Generalized Markup Language and was later used for XML.

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, while XSL have also used the same approach used by FOSI.

According to many Web design Philippines experts, DSSSL was accepted as a standard in style sheet languages, similar to CSS, but because of its complexity for the World Wide Web, the World Wide Web Consortium thought about creating a DSSSL-Lite. As for FOSI, it was never accepted as a standard in web designing.

XSL
XSL or Extensible Stylesheet Language, is a term widely known in the market today as a family of languages used to transform and render XML documents. These include:
XSL Transformations (XSLT) – An XML language mostly used for transforming XML documents.
XSL Formating Objects (XSL-FO) – An XML language for specifying the visual formatting of an XML document


According to many Web design Philippines experts, XSL is more powerful compared to the use of CSS in a number of instances, particularly with the combination of XSLT and XSL-FO. This is because XSLT is a Turing complete language, while CSS is not; this demonstrates a degree of power and flexibility not found in CSS, while XSL-FO is unlike CSS in that the XSL-FO document stands alone. This is the reason why XSL is also accepted as a standard in web designing.

However, the complexity of XSL, particularly XSL-FO, makes it complicated for web designers to design a website. According to many Web design Philippines experts, 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.

Other Style Sheet Languages

JSSS
JavaScript Style Sheets (JSSS) was a stylesheet language technology proposed by Netscape Communications Corporation in 1996 to provide facilities for defining the presentation of webpages. It was founded to compete with CSS technology although JSSS itself was never accepted as a formal standard and it never gained much acceptance in the market. It now remains little more than a historical footnote, with many Web developers not even being aware of its existence. The proposed standard was not finished.

Sass
Sass or Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets was designed as a meta-language on top of CSS, and is meant to abstract CSS code and create simpler stylesheet files. After its initial versions, its founders have continued to extend Sass with SassScript, a simple scripting language used in Sass files.

Source: http://www.articlealley.com/article_1789712_4.html

1 comment:

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