Style Sheet Languages Before CSS

CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is one of the most widely used forms of style sheet languages used in the
market. According to many professionals,

11/24/2010
Style Sheet Languages Before CSS
CSS or Cascading Style Sheets is one of the most widely used form of style sheet languages used
in the market. According to many professionals, CSS was the perfect move from the use of tables
in web designs to tableless designs. However, before CSS was developed and made the standard
language used in the industry, there have also been other style sheet languages used in the
industry. Some of the known languages are FOSI and DSSSL.

FOSI (Formatting Output Specification Instance)

The Formatting Output Specification Instance or FOSI was first used as a style sheet language
used for SGML then it was eventually used in XML. FOSI was developed by the US Department
of Defense to control the pagination and layout of SGML and XML technical data. According to
many Web design Philippines experts, FOSI stylesheets are themselves written in SGML. It was
an approach which was later adopted by XSL, a style sheet language that competes with CSS in
today’s industry.

DSSSL (Document Style Semantics and Specification Language)

Document Style Semantics and Specification Language or DSSSL is a computer language for
specifying stylesheets for SGML documents. SGML contains information in a machine-readable
but not very human-readable format. A “stylesheet” is used to present the information stored in
SGML in a more pleasing or accessible way. DSSSL can convert to a wide range of formats,
including RTF, HTML, and LaTeX. Today, however, DSSSL is gradually being replaced by
XSL.

According to Web design Philippines experts, the difference that made CSS more popular in the
market is because unlike DSSSL and FOSI, CSS allowed a document’s style to be influenced by
multiple style sheets. One style sheet could inherit or “cascade” from another, permitting a
mixture of stylistic preferences controlled equally by the site designer and user. However, other
than DSSSL and FOSI, JSSS has also been a style sheet language which have been known to
have competed with CSS.

JSSS (JavaScript Style Sheets)

JavaScript Style Sheets (JSSS) was a stylesheet language technology 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. However, it
was never accepted as a formal standard and it never gained much acceptance in the market.
According to many Web design Philippines experts, Netscape eventually stopped promoting
JSSS and instead focused on the rival CSS standard, which was also supported by Internet
Explorer and had much wider industry acceptance.

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