Another weblog about CSS begins

Most of the web today completely relies on CSS for styling the appearance of documents.

Whether a web page is HTML, XHTML, or perhaps some other form of XML - CSS can be used to style it. Not just affecting the appearance of text - but also controlling the layout of different blocks of content on the page and even inserting images and text as needed - for a little extra panache.

While CSS is not as powerful as XSLT in terms of reorganizing and filtering the content of a document, it does have some strong advantages over XSLT.

1. works with grungy real-world HTML pages, not merely XHTML/XML documents
2. very concise way of defining rules - selectors and properties, that is all it takes
3. supported by every web browser to some degree
4. no programming skill required at all in order to be able to write CSS

There are a lot more things that they both have in common.

1. can operate on any XML document (yes, it is true - CSS 2 can style XML)
2. supported by virtually every browser, to some degree (note fully support CSS 2.1, the longtime current standard, yet)
3. supported by every web browser to some degree
4. Java text components support CSS, a little - and XSLT completely

I have been working with XSLT for almost 5 years, and CSS for almost 4 years.

I have had the odd pleasure of generating HTML pages with my CSS in them from my own hand-written XSLT. I generated XSL-FO marked up documents with the identical content and corresponding styles.

I like using all of them. They are a lot of fun. They are understood, literally, by software around the world.

There probably is not a desktop computer in the world at this point that does not understand these technologies. Certainly, every computer made in the past 7 years does.

So CSS is extremely relevant to business people, home computer users, bloggers, people reading/writing email - everyone who uses a computer, really. Even programmers, if you must know.

Because CSS is so important, I wanted to own a blog that would keep track of the exciting developments going on with this powerful tool. Text speaks what is on the mind. Adding CSS expresses it.