XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language)

XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language)

INTRODUCTION:

1. What is a Style-Sheet?

Style sheets describe how documents are presented on screens,in print ,or perhaps how they are pronounced.By attaching style sheet to the structured documents on the Web authors and readers can influence the presentation on documents without sacrificing device-independence or adding new HTML tags.

Web style sheets have been around for a number of years, but their power and importance went largely unnoticed since few implementations existed. Web authors, anxious to add creativity to their pages by influencing the presentation, began to use Netscape's proprietary extensions rather than the more powerful style sheets.

Today, more and more browsers are implementing style sheets, opening authors' eyes to unique features that allow influence over presentation while preserving platform independence. The advantages of style sheets became apparent, as did the disadvantages of continually creating more HTML tags for presentation effects.

2. The 'Terms'

Knowing XSL includes getting familiar with following acronyms:

• XML - Extensible MarkUp Language - Allows data or content to be marked up using tags invented by the author.
• CSS - Cascading Style Sheets - A technique, that's used to add style to HTML.
• DSSSL - Document Style Semantics and Specification Language - An international standard for associating processing with
SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) documents (in other words how a printer should process it!).
XSL (Extensible Style Language) is a stylesheet language designed for the Web community. It provides functionality far beyond CSS (e.g. element reordering).
XSL is intended to be accessible to the markup level user by providing a declarative solution to most data description and rendering requirements. Less common tasks are accommodated through a graceful escape to a familiar scripting environment. This approach is familiar to the Web publishing community as it is modeled after the HTML/JavaScript environment. With XSL, the family of XML specifications now includes: XML -- the subset of SGML that is the XML language. XLL --addressing and linking capabilities defined in the XPointer and XLink specs .XSL -- a language to specify the association of presentation style with XML information


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