XML Unleashed

The Evolution of CSS and XSL

Although style sheets have caught on in the HTML world only in the last year or two, they have been around for a while. In fact, early SGML systems employed style sheets to separate content from presentation years ago. Most of us were too busy hacking HTML tables to notice, though. Even early HTML browsers used style sheets internally to determine how to render HTML document data. There was a time when the <font> tag was unheard of; the browser determined how a document was displayed.

It wasn't until 1994 that CSS was first discussed, and it would be another year before it was formally proposed to the W3C. It became a W3C recommendation in December 1996. This initial CSS recommendation described CSS1, which stands ...