December 1999
Intermediate to advanced
992 pages
22h 3m
English
To understand XSL and CSS, you first have to understand the basic premise behind style sheets. Obviously, the Web had style well before style sheets entered the picture, so what's the big deal?
The big deal is that the Web community in general, and the XML community in particular, have finally realized that merging content markup with presentation layout styles can be costly in terms of maintenance, flexibility, and complexity. HTML is the glaring example of what happens when you randomly combine content and presentation in a single markup language.
In reality, HTML was never designed to be a presentation language. In fact, markup languages in general are inherently designed to describe ...