XML in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Choosing Between CSS and XSL-FO

CSS is a very straightforward, easy-to-learn, easy-to-use language for formatting web pages. To the extent that CSS has gotten a reputation as buggy and difficult to use, that’s mostly because of inconsistent, nonstandard browser implementations. Opera 4.0 and later, Netscape 6.0 and later, Mozilla, and Safari provide extensive support for most features of CSS Level 2, with only a few minor bugs. Internet Explorer’s support is much weaker, but it borders on usable.

It’s hard to imagine any text-based web site you can’t produce by using XSLT to transform a document into HTML and then applying a CSS stylesheet. Alternately, you can transform the XML document into another XML document and apply the CSS stylesheet to that. If the element content in the original XML document is exactly what you want to display in the output document, in the correct order, you can even omit the XSLT transformation step, as we did in Examples Example 13-1 and Example 13-2 in the previous chapter.

Perhaps most importantly, CSS is already well-understood by web designers and well-supported by current browsers. XSL-FO is not directly supported by any browsers. To view an XSL-FO document, you must first convert it into the inconvenient PDF format. PDF does not adjust as well as HTML to the wide variety of monitors and screen sizes in use today. Viewing it inside a web browser requires a special plug-in. The limited open source tools that support XSL-FO are beta quality at best. ...