Printing XML: Why CSS Is Better than XSL

An anonymous contributor writes "XML.com just published an article titled Printing XML: Why CSS Is Better than XSL written by Michael Day and Håkon Wium Lie. The article was written in response to Norm Walsh's claim that CSS will never fix [printing]. Did you hear me? CSS will never fix it!. The article shows how a 100-line CSS style sheet gives you the same formatted version of W3C's Webarch as the 1000-line XSL style sheet by using Prince."

Comments

The authors aren't talking about using browser-CSS

[watanabe]

There's already a lot of discussion here about how IE's XSL transforms (and CSS support in printing) both suck, and how a proper workflow for XSL involves a server-side transform.

The authors of their CSS Rocks article are imagining that you're going to use software like Prince, (software that one of them created) to apply CSS3 rules to XML and get PDFs out of them.

Another way to say this is that they're not talking about how to fix the browser -> print workflow in this article (although one of the authors works for Opera, so I imagine he's thinking about it). They're talking about easy ways to transform XML to PDFs, and discussing why you might use CSS to do such a thing.

This courteous and friendly rationalizing of the slashdot editor's inflammatory post has been brought to you by my company, which is paying me for the time I use to write this. The opinions, of course, are mine only.

XSLT is for transformation

[Pascal Sartoretti]

As an XSLT developer, I agree that CSS is simpler and more readable. However: the "T" in XSLT stands for "transformation". It means that you can do things like generating a table of contents, a table of figures, etc. which would not be possible with just CSS.

The bottom line (at least for me): if you can do it with CSS, do it with CSS. But there are some cases where you will need XSLT.