Inside XML

Chapter 14. XSL Formatting Objects

In the previous chapter, we took a look at the XSL transformation language. In this chapter, we'll take a look at the second half of XSL: formatting objects.

The W3C has defined such formatting objects as root, block, and character that support different properties such as font-weight, line-height, and border. Using these predefined objects, you can specify the exact formatting for a document. At this writing, there are 56 formatting objects and 177 properties that apply to these objects. Each of these objects has its own XML tag, and the properties that it supports are attributes of that tag. (Many of these properties come from CSS2, which you can read more about in Chapter 9, "Cascading Style Sheets.")