Summary

Style sheets represent an important technological innovation with respect to the Web because they make it possible to exert exacting control over the appearance of content in both HTML and XML documents. Style sheets allow markup languages such as HTML and other custom XML-based languages to focus on their primary jobstructuring data according to its meaning. With a clean separation between content and presentation, documents coded in HTML and XML are better organized and more easily managed.

This hour introduced you to the basics of style sheets, including the three main style sheet technologies that are applicable to XML: CSS, XSLT, and XSL-FO. Although these technologies all solve similar problems, they are very different technologies with unique pros and cons. Although you learned the fundamentals of how and when to use each type of style sheet, the remaining hours in this part of the book paint a much clearer picture of what can be done in the way of styling XML data with CSS, XSLT, and XSL-FO style sheets.