XML.com: Comparing CSS and XSL: A Reply from Norm Walsh

XML.com: Comparing CSS and XSL: A Reply from Norm Walsh

Comparing CSS and XSL: A Reply from Norm Walsh
by Norman Walsh
February 09, 2005

In Printing XML: Why CSS Is Better than XSL, Håkon Wium Lie and Michael Day launch an aggressive attack on my assertion that "web browsers suck at printing" and "CSS is never going to fix it." In retrospect, I regret the way that I expressed that. I suppose the shortest possible reply to their article would simply be "I was wrong. Cool!" For simple HTML documents, CSS can produce reasonable-looking print output. (Printing from web browsers still sucks, and I don't see any evidence that that's going to change in the near future, at least not for the web browsers with the largest market share.)

Lie and Day use my casual remark as a springboard for a more general discussion of why CSS is better than XSL. As active developers of the CSS specifications, I'm hardly surprised, especially since they've covered this ground before. I've covered this ground before too; I've been involved in XSL from the beginning. I don't believe that XSL is better than CSS and I never have. I think it's great that CSS has developed the ability to produce reasonable pages with running headers and footers and multiple columns. I can't see how to extend it to support multiple flow regions, back of the book indexes, change bars, or some of the other features in XSL 1.1, nor can I see how to produce print output from source XML manuscripts, in general, without the transformational power of XSLT. But, as we've just seen, I've been wrong before.