Talk:Document Style Semantics and Specification Language

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CSS vs. DSSSL

Shouldn't the article reveal that for all practical intents and purposes, DSSSL was displaced by CSS in the late 1990s?-- era (Talk | History) 10:50, 20 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Not really; they were never players in the same space. DSSSL, like XSL, transforms semantically structured documents into layout specifications; CSS decorates a structure with formatting properties. CSS caught on much more widely due to its simplicity and the fact that its target audience was the Web rather than large-scale publishers, but I don’t think it’s accurate to say that DSSSL was displaced by CSS. — crism (talk) 21:01, 22 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Any discussion of CSS really needs to refer to Haakon Lie's PhD thesis. This explains many of the design decisions behind CSS, particularly those that are seen by CSS newcomers as "limitations" in CSS. CSS was intended to be the styling language in widespread use, not just one of many. This influenced its design, particularly by encouraging simplicty in both its understanding and use, its implementation (M$ & IE's failure to read the CSS spec notwithstanding) and even the processing overhead needed to implement CSS on small-scale devices. In particular he's quite clear that DSSSL was looked at before designing CSS, considered as a possible basis for the web stylesheet language, and then rejected for over-complexity. Thank goodness for that. Andy Dingley (talk) 09:27, 24 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]