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CSS or XSL?

Volume 8, Issue 17; 10 Feb 2005; last modified 08 Oct 2010

A probably redundant pointer to the CSS vs. XSL debates at XML.com.

The story so far…

In December, I made an offhand remark about CSS. Håkon Wium Lie and Michael Day replied on XML.com. Yesterday, XML.com published my rebuttal. If you read anything online about XML, this is probably not news, but it seemed odd not to mention it here.

Speaking of news, publication of Lie and Day's article marked the first time I was slashdotted. Does it show?

January Log Summary
January Log Summary

Of course, that only reflects the number of successful retrievals. My bandwidth was saturated for a while, so there's no telling how many attempts failed. Or whether the continuing debate is worth slashdotting again.

Comments

In reply to the bit about CSS validators inside browsers. Recent Mozilla versions have support for that in the javascript console.

—Posted by Anne on 10 Feb 2005 @ 02:58 UTC #

Yeah, CSS validation seemed like something pretty obvious for the browsers to implement. They have to parse it, after all. Of course, if it was expressed in XM...no, nevermind. I'm glad to hear the exist, I'll have to give it a try. Thanks, Anne!

—Posted by Norman Walsh on 10 Feb 2005 @ 03:06 UTC #

Somehow I think it would not make sense to express CSS in XML. After all, it was designed in the HTML browser era and has to be compatible with HTML. I guess CSS expressed as XML language might have its advantages but simple CSS selectors combined with declaration blocks are probably easier to understand for authors.

Besides that CSS does not know well-formed as XML does it. (It does have error parsing rules as opposed to HTML.) This makes it a lot easier for authors to create a style sheet.

—Posted by Anne on 10 Feb 2005 @ 04:05 UTC #

Note the reference (http://norman.walsh.name/2004/12/15/examples/webarch.pdf) in your web recommendation essay (http://norman.walsh.name/2004/12/15/webarch) to the "nice pdf" doesn't work; presumably it should be to http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2004/webarch-20041014/webarch.pdf ?

—Posted by Oisin McGuinness on 10 Feb 2005 @ 06:52 UTC #

Yes, pointing to the W3C copy would be ok, but I'm pretty sure I meant to have the copy locally as well. It will be fixed momentarily. Thanks for letting me know.

—Posted by Norman Walsh on 10 Feb 2005 @ 07:09 UTC #

Nightly trunk builds of the Mozilla Suite and Firefox have CSS parse error reporting in the JavaScript Console.

—Posted by Bob Clary on 11 Feb 2005 @ 04:09 UTC #