Overview of Stylesheet Languages

  • CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)

    • too limited to cover complexity of DocBook

    • are used to define visual appearance of DocBook in visual XML editors

    • W3C recommendation

  • XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language)

    • XSLT – describes transformation from XML document to XML, HTML or plain text

    • XSL FO (formatting objects) – “typographical quality” formatting for printed media (PDF, PostScript, RTF)

    • W3C recommendation

  • DSSSL (Document Style Semantics and Specification Language)

    • originally developed for SGML, can be used with XML as well

    • transformation to HTML, print output

    • ISO standard