Why CSS is better than XSL

Back in 2005, author’s Håkon Wium Lie and Michael Day were on a war path: “A recent entry in the blog of a web luminary may signal the start of a second round of hostilities. Norman Walsh, a member of the W3C’s Technical Architecture Group and co-author of the W3C’s Web Architecture document (WebArch), recently blogged:

... web browsers suck at printing. … And CSS is never going to fix it. Did you hear me? CSS is never going to fix it.

It’s unclear if this statement is a prediction or a threat. Or just blogging on a bad day. Anyway, the pronounciation of CSS’ printing ineptness gives us a splendid opportunity to explain why CSS is a better language than XSL for most printing needs. As we have just used CSS to style a 400-page book which will be published later this year (Cascading Stylesheets, designing for the web by Håkon Lie and Bert Bos, 3rd ed, forthcoming from Addison-Wesley, this year), this is not purely an academic excercise in stylesheet linguistics. So, would-be authors should continue reading.

…

Both camps agree that a printed document is, in many ways, more difficult to format than on-screen presentation. A printed document must be split into numbered pages, with added headers and footers. Page margins must be specified, and they may be different on left and right pages. References that appear as hyperlinks on-screen often include page numbers on paper.

The disagreement starts with how best to express all this. Walsh’s solution is to write a 1000-line XSL transformation that generates XSL-FO, which is subsequently turned into PDF. We will argue that it’s much easier for most authors to express styling in CSS; in the case of the WebArch document, one can reuse the existing CSS stylesheets (200 lines or so) and add some print-specific lines. And, although browsers tend to focus on dynamic screens rather than on printing, products like Prince happily combine CSS with XML and produce beautiful PDF documents. ”

Read the rest of their argument for CSS through XML.com.