Direct Display of XML in Browsers
Ultimately, one hopes that browsers will be able to display not just XHTML documents but any XML document as well. Since it’s too much to ask that browsers provide semantics for all XML applications both current and yet-to-be-invented, stylesheets will be attached to each document to provide instructions about how each element will be rendered.
The current major stylesheet languages are:
Cascading Style Sheets Level 1 (CSS1)
Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 (CSS2)
XSL Transformations 1.0
Eventually, there will be more versions of these, including at least CSS 2.1, CSS Level 3, and XSLT 2.0. However, let’s begin by looking at how and how well existing style languages are supported by existing browsers.