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

Great example of hard-coding reducing size.

[SuperKendall]

If you check them out, at least one savings in the CSS is that it hard-codes the page size for a single size.

If you look at the XSL, it selects different text sizes for different page sizes.

Thus I would have to say - have they tried printing both examples using different page sizes? Because I am pretty sure the CSS version will be a postage stamp in the middle of an A0 page.

Also from quick examination it looked like the XSL is more flexible in other ways, you can pass in all sorts of parameteres like margins.

Basically - sure the XSL is longer, but also more flexible in terms of use. Since you are only going to write it once (that is unless you want multiple page sizes in which case you are going to have many CSS files) what does it matter if there is a little code-size increase?

Furthermore the XSL could itself be transformed in various interesting ways for special modifications, a task harder to do with CSS. And you could include things like the paper-size->font-size mapping in seperate files to keep the size down and the file more readable (though I find the XSL perfectly readable - after having used XSL for a while, admittedly!).

Incorrect comparison

[Carewolf]

He is not only using a lot of CSS3 in his examples, but he is using things that does not even look to become parts of CSS3. For instance the content:target-counter was in a working draft of the css3 paged module, but have been withdrawn from the latest version.