Other Types Of Style Sheet Language Other Than CSS

Cascading Style Sheets or CSS has always been one of the most popular style sheet language used by many web developers and designers in today's industry. It proved its use by enabling the separation of document content (those that are written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation, including elements such as the layout, colors, and fonts.

This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, enable multiple pages to share formatting, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content (such as by allowing for tableless web design). However, other than CSS, there have also been other style sheet languages used in the past and up to this day.

Although not as popularly used compared to CSS, some of which have been discontinued, these style sheet languages were known for its use and its convenience compared to the use of tables. So what are these other style sheet languages aside from CSS?

Document Style Semantics and Specification Language (DSSSL)
The DSSSL is a computer language for specifying stylesheets for Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) documents, based on a subset of the Scheme programming language. It is specified by the standard ISO/IEC 10179:1996. It was developed by ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34. In parallel with the move from SGML to XML, the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is gradually replacing DSSSL. However, many of the concepts used in XSL originated with DSSSL.

Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL)
Considered as the second most popularly used style sheet language used in the industry aside from CSS (although for some, this is considered as the best compared to CSS), XSL has evolved drastically from its initial design into something very different from its original purpose. According to Web design Philippines specialists, XSL began as an attempt to bring the functionality of DSSSL, particularly in the area of print and high-end typesetting, to XML.

According to many Web design Philippines professionals, the combination of XSLT and XSL-FO creates a powerful styling language, though much more complex than CSS.

JavaScript Style Sheets (JSSS)
A style sheet language proposed by Netscape Communications Corporation in 1996 to provide facilities for defining the presentation of webpages. It was an alternative to the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) technology. Only Netscape Communicator 4 supported JSSS, with the rival Internet Explorer web browser choosing not to implement the technology. Soon after Netscape Communicator's release in 1997, Netscape stopped promoting JSSS, instead focusing on the rival CSS standard. It now remains little more than a historical footnote, with many Web developers not even being aware of its existence.

FOSI (Formatting Output Specification Instance)
FOSI was developed by the US Department of Defense to control the pagination and layout of SGML and XML technical data. FOSI stylesheets are themselves written in SGML, an approach that would later be adopted by XSL. FOSI was implemented by, among others, Arbortext and X.Systems.

Sass (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets)
A module that is included in Haml. It is described as a meta-language on top of CSS, and is meant to abstract CSS code and create simpler stylesheet files. According to many Web design Philippines consultants, one of the key features of Sass is its nested rules, which make complicated nested selectors easy to read and write. Visit http://www.myoptimind.com for more info.