Real World XML

CSS and XSL

Stylesheets are becoming increasing important in HTML because, in HTML 4, many built-in style features such as the <CENTER> element have become deprecated (declared obsolete) in favor of stylesheets. However, most HTML programming ignores stylesheets entirely.

The story is different in XML, however. In XML, you create your own elements, which means that if you want a browser to display them, you have to tell it how. This is both good and bad: good because it allows you to use the powerful Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) and Extensible Styleheet Language (XSL) specifications to customize the appearance of your XML elements far beyond what's possible with standard HTML, but bad because it can demand a lot of additional work. (One way of ...