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10. XSL: Doing XML With Style

The highlights of the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) initiative include:
Based on DSSSL After SGML became an international standard, work began on developing a stylesheet standard. The purpose of the standard was to facilitate the interchange of stylesheets and ultimately to improve the interoperability of all of the software that handles documents. This effort, formally known as the Document Style Semantics and Specification Language (DSSSL), was eventually approved as an ISO standard. To date, however, no commercial application supports DSSSL. XSL will provide much of the functionality of DSSSL, but in a form that is far more likely to be widely adopted and supported.
Compatible with CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are supported by both Microsoft and Netscape as a mechanism for overriding the default style of HTML tags. As a result, CSS offers more formatting flexibility than HTML without a stylesheet. XSL will be a superset of the CSS functionality. XSL will be designed to enable automatic conversion from CSS, so existing investments in CSS will not be lost.
Reordering capability Through XSL stylesheets, a Web browser will be able to change the sequence of the data that is displayed without going back to the server. This will be useful for any application that needs to support the interactive suppression or enabling of data display, as well as any arbitrary sequence.
More powerful context sensitivity While CSS supports the application of style based on the parent of an element, XSL allows the style to vary based on all the ancestors, descendants, and siblings of an element. This will provide far more formatting flexibility based on the context or position of an element within a document.
Supports both printing and online display While CSS is limited to online display functions, XSL will support formatting functions that are needed in order to support the greater complexity of printed documents.

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