XML over CSS

Hi,

I am a relatively new PHP programmer and I am familiar with programming
logic of web sites.Â*Â*IÂ*nowÂ*wantÂ*toÂ*getÂ*aÂ*goodÂ*graspÂ*o fÂ*contentÂ*and
presentation.Â*Â*IÂ*amÂ*tryingÂ*toÂ*figureÂ*outÂ*i fÂ*IÂ*shouldÂ*focusÂ*onÂ*XMLÂ*andÂ*XSL
or CSS.Â*Â*Â*

Can XML and XSL be used to show content to a browser?Â*Â*orÂ*canÂ*onlyÂ*HTMLÂ*do
that?Â*Â*

I am thinking that if I could do everything in XML and XSL that I could do
using CSS that I might want to focus on XML and XSL because I can also do
other things with XML and XSL like Web services.

But, is XML and XSL harder to use than CSS and HTML?Â*Â*SignifigantlyÂ*harder?

I am planning on building large content management type Web applications.

Your humble opinion is much appreciated (YHOIMA)

Mudge <mark1822 (AT) hotmail (DOT) com> wrote:

Â*Â*IÂ*amÂ*tryingÂ*toÂ*figureÂ*outÂ*ifÂ*IÂ*should *focusÂ
*onÂ*XMLÂ*andÂ*XSL or CSS.Â*Â*Â*

(Please use US-Ascii on Usenet, not UTF-8.)

Can XML and XSL be used to show content to a
browser?

You mean letting the browser handle the XML and XSL? That's possible, for
some browsers.

It's generally not a good idea in Web authoring, since the page would
presumably be completely inaccessible without XSL support enabled.
Besides, e.g. indexing robots would probably either skip it or treat it
as generic XML (they hardly do any XSL), taking just the textual content
of elements as strings of texts with no structure.

But, is XML and XSL harder to use than CSS and
HTML?Â*Â*SignifigantlyÂ*harder?

I would say so. And XSL alone won't make CSS unnecessary; you would still
need to use CSS for styling the visual appearance. But done properly,
with XSL processing done server side, it could work very well. User
agents would get an HTML document and an optional CSS suggestion on its
rendering, knowing nothing about the process that generated them.

It really depends on what you are aiming at. Is there some reason not to
generate just HTML 4.01 documents with <link> elements referring to a
style sheet, and then considering the styling of the HTML documents as a
separate issue?

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/