Roadmap

Cascading Stylesheets were designed to work with HTML, but they were never intended for use with XML. Although CSS is a very nice tool for working with layout and design, there are still a number of features that would be nice for working with XML documents that CSS does not afford.

Because of those shortcomings, the W3C developed the Extensible Stylesheet Language, which is designed specifically for working with XML documents. In fact, XSL is divided into two parts, one of which is called XSL Transformations, or XSLT, which deals with stylesheets designed for transforming XML. With XSLT, you can convert your XML documents from one XML vocabulary to another, such as from XML to WML. You can also convert XML documents into HTML. After you convert your XML document to HTML, you can even use CSS with the HTML as you normally do.

However, you could also take advantage of XSL Formatting Objects, or XSL-FO, to format the XML directly for display on the Web or in print.

From here, we'll go on to Chapter 8, “The New Wave of Stylesheets: XSL,” where we will take a first look at XSL, discuss how XSL stylesheets are structured, and introduce XSLT and XSL-FO. From there, in Chapter 9, “Transforming XML Data into Other Formats with XSLT,” we will look at XSLT in more detail. Finally in Chapter 10, “The Nuts and Bolts of XSL: Formatting Objects,” we will look at XSL-FO and applying stylesheets for display and generating PDFs.