XML Hacks

Apply Style to an XML Document with CSS

Make an in-browser XML document more appealing by applying a CSS stylesheet to it.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a W3C language for applying style to HTML, XHTML, or XML documents (http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/). CSS Level 1 or CSS/1 (http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS1) came out of the W3C in 1996 and was later revised in 1999. CSS Level 2 or CSS/2 (http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/) became a W3C recommendation in 1998. CSS/3 is under construction (http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/current-work). Understandably, CSS/1 enjoys the widest support.

To apply CSS to an XML document, you must use the XML stylesheet processing instruction, which is based on another recommendation of the W3C (http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-stylesheet). The XML stylesheet processing instruction is optional unless you are using a stylesheet that you want to associate with an XML document in a standard way.

Processing Instructions

A processing instruction (PI) is a structure in an XML document that contains an instruction to an application (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-pi). Generally, PIs can appear anywhere that an element can appear, although the XML stylesheet PI must appear at the beginning of an XML document (though after the XML declaration, if one is present). The beginning part of an XML document, before the document element begins, is called a prolog.

Here is an example of a PI:

<?xml-stylesheet href="time.css" type="text/css"?>

A PI is bounded by <? and ?>. The term immediately following ...