Learning XML, 2nd Edition

Stylesheets

XML and stylesheets go together like naked people and clothes. Let’s take a moment to familiarize ourselves with the general concepts behind stylesheets. First, why do you want them? Second, how do they work? Finally, are there limitations, and what can we do about them?

Why We Need Them

I can rant about why it’s important to keep information pure and separate presentation into stylesheets, but this would ignore a critical question: if it’s easier to write in presentational markup—and I admit that it is—why would you want to bother with stylesheets? After all, the Web itself testifies to the fact that presentational markup is working quite well for what it was designed to do. For that matter, what’s wrong with plain text?

If you are already familiar with the sermon, then skip this section, because I’m going to preach the religion of stylesheets now.

XML was inspired, to a large extent, by the limitations of HTML. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of HTML, always had stylesheets in mind, but for some reason, they had been forgotten in the huge initial surge of webification. Although HTML had only limited presentational capabilities built in, it was enough to satisfy the hordes of new web authors. Easy to implement and even easier to learn, HTML was soon stretched far beyond its original intentions as a simple report-formatting language, forced to encode everything from product catalogs to corporate portals. But the very thing that led to its rapid uptake, presentational markup, ...