The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has
released associating style sheets with XML Documents as a recommendation.
Representing cross-industry and expert community agreement on the first efforts for allowing style sheets to be associated with an XML
document, the recommendation brings a wider range of design and display
options to XML authors. A W3C recommendation indicates that a specification
is stable, contributes to Web interoperability and has been reviewed by
the W3C membership, who favor its adoption by the industry.
Style sheet development and the separation of presentation information from the structure of a document has been a core W3C work area since its
inception. Web publishers have been using style sheets written in the
cascading style sheet (CSS) language to flexibly enhance the display of Web pages written in HTML.
With more developers using XML, the need for quick and effective style
control over XML documents has emerged. Vendors show strong interest in a
timely specification to be included in product releases. The current W3C
specification allows a style sheet to be linked by including one or more
processing instructions with a target of “XML-stylesheet” in the prolog of
the document.
