Web Style Sheets

By attaching style sheets to the structured documents of the web (e.g. HTML), authors and readers can influence the presentation of documents without sacrificing device-independence or adding new HTML tags. This page contains pointers to information about style sheets on the web as well as W3C Style Sheets Activities. If you are new to the subject, you may want to read some introductory material:

• Microsoft has opened a CSS gallery.
• Style Sheets made it to the front page of Websmith.
• InfoWorld has recently published several articles about style sheets:
  • Style Sheets will preserve basic HTML for all browsers
  • Common HTML style sheet standard gains key endorsement
  • Netscape sets timetable for launch of Navigator 4.0 browser
• Life on the bleeding edge is a good introduction to the concept of style sheets and why the web needs them.
• David Siegel's Balkanization of the web

Current Style Sheet activities

Two style sheet specifications are currently proposed for use on the web. One is CSS, a simple, non-standard style sheet mechanism from W3C. CSS is is currently being implemented in several Web clients. The other is DSSSL, an ISO standard, which has many adherents but currently (6/96) no implementations. The two approaches have different goals and time frames.

DSSSL

• The final Document Style Semantics and Specification Language (DSSSL) draft is available from the Novell Publications Server. DSSSL, an ISO standard, is a meta-language for specifying style sheet languages that is coming from the SGML community.
• DSSSL Online (previously called DSSSL-Lite) is an initiative to define a subset of DSSSL as a basis for a common style sheet language. Discussions take place in comp.text.sgml. The archives of the now dysfunctional dsssl-lite mailing list are also available.

CSS

• See theCSS resource page

Other style sheet resources

• W3C hosts the [email protected] mailing list on style sheets. Feel free to add yourself or browse the archive.
• A recent draft from W3C discusses HTML3 and Style Sheets. This proposal is independant of the style sheet language.
• Fonts are important for style sheets to succeed on the Web.

Products with Style Sheets support

• Panorama from SoftQuad has a style sheet mechanism.
• DynaText from EBT also implements style sheets
• For a list of products that support CSS, see the CSS resource page.

Historical Style Sheet proposals

The proposals are roughly in chronological order. They contain ideas that current proposals build upon, and serve as background material.

• Robert Raisch's A Style sheet proposal. This proposal groups visual parameters and specifies a simple declarative language for setting values. Simple and concise.
• Pei Wei's Stylesheet language proposal. You can also see sample renderings. Pretty! Comment from Steve Heaney,
• H�kon Lie's Cascading HTML style sheets The emphasis here is not on syntax or list of parameters, but on the abilty for several stylesheets (specified by e.g. user and author) to influence the final presentation. Comments from Bert Bos, Brian Behlendorf, Pei Wei, and Dave Raggett. Kevin Hughes posted extensive comments and suggestions to a later draft.
• Jon Bosak's HDL proposal, the HDL Q & A. These are found in the Davenport Group Archive.
• Joe English' Style Sheets for HTML. Although the author announces that this stylesheet proposal probably will be abandoned in favor of DSSSL-Lite, it contains valuable discussions.
• Bert Bos' Stream-based Stylesheet Proposal. This proposal borrows from -- and comments -- several of the other proposals. Bert Bos also published a collection of articles on style sheets in general.
• "Style sheets for HTML"

Related resources

• C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, Robert F. Goldstein: HTML to the Max: A Manifesto for Adding SGML Intelligence to the World-Wide Web This paper was presented at the WWW'94 conference in Chicago. Also from one of the authors: Sketch of Simple Formatting Primitives
• Kent Wittenburg and Louis Weitzman's Automatic Presentation of Multimedia Documents Using Relational Grammars (Postscipt version, large) Appeared in Proceedings of ACM Multimedia'94, San Francisco, Oct 15-20, 1994
• Vincent Quint: The languages of GRIF (compressed postscript version, large)
• C. Roisin, I. Vatton: Merging Logical and Physical Structures in Documents (postscript), Electronic Publishing -- Origination, Dissemination and Design, special issue Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Electronic Publishing, Document Manipulation and Typography, EP94, vol. 6, num. 4, pp. 327-337, April 1994.
• David Silverman: Toward a Universal Library - SGML and the future of electronic documents. This article appeared on the "geek page" of Wired magazine 3.08.

Other approaches to putting style on the web

• DigitalStyle promotes Websuite.
• FutureTense demonstrates their Gazette
• Adobe Acrobat
• Netscape's HTML2 extensions, HTML3 extensions,and color attributes.
• w3magic is a "tool that adds over 100 new high-level tags to all your HTML documents".
• Common Ground's Digital Paper

• RFC 1563 defines The text/enriched MIME Content-type.
• HyperTeX
• Imagen's RTC, an online extension to RTF.

• Severe Tire Damage