e-Publishing with CSS
Friday, 19. May 2006, 10:05:31
Some time ago XSL FO lost battle for web where it apparantly failed to replace more convenient, easy to learn and easy to use CSS. Result is quite natural as, being specially designed for usage on web, CSS establishes good balance between rules specified by author of the document (via author's style sheet), user's preferences (specified via user style sheet) and browser's defaults (UA style sheet), in addition it allows authors to write media specific style sheets that take into account media type (screen, print, projection, handheld, speech, tv) as well as device parameters (color/bw, screen width/height/resolution etc), while CSS selectors admit incremental matching that allows browsers to render pages progressively as while page is loading.
One of these factors (progressive rendering) is no longer relevant in case of paged media where outcome of battle between CSS and XSL FO is not clear yet, but even on page media CSS has many advantages over other style languages. Inspite of its advantages CSS is not really popular in e-publishing, however situation is changing as more and more people realize that eliminating gap between the web and e-publishing will simplify whole publishing process including authoring, formatting and delivery of content. Taking into account that modern browsers are not really keen when it comes to paged media, it is important to have good CSS formatters and publishing oriented browsers. Release of professional CSS formatter (Prince developed by YesLogic) was first successful step towards CSS based e-publishing framework, OpenReader format for e-books is another good trend that reduces gap between web standards and e-book formats and finally release of new publishing oriented tool¹ that combines browser, CSS formatter, server side applications, PDF generator and source editor suggests that CSS has good chances to win the battle.
¹I meant PDFreactor developed by RealObjects, it supports XML, XHTML, CSS, XSLT and SVG. CSS support is promising but not as strong as in Prince (for example ACID2 fails), however it provides browser like viewer and has XSLT processor.
One of these factors (progressive rendering) is no longer relevant in case of paged media where outcome of battle between CSS and XSL FO is not clear yet, but even on page media CSS has many advantages over other style languages. Inspite of its advantages CSS is not really popular in e-publishing, however situation is changing as more and more people realize that eliminating gap between the web and e-publishing will simplify whole publishing process including authoring, formatting and delivery of content. Taking into account that modern browsers are not really keen when it comes to paged media, it is important to have good CSS formatters and publishing oriented browsers. Release of professional CSS formatter (Prince developed by YesLogic) was first successful step towards CSS based e-publishing framework, OpenReader format for e-books is another good trend that reduces gap between web standards and e-book formats and finally release of new publishing oriented tool¹ that combines browser, CSS formatter, server side applications, PDF generator and source editor suggests that CSS has good chances to win the battle.
¹I meant PDFreactor developed by RealObjects, it supports XML, XHTML, CSS, XSLT and SVG. CSS support is promising but not as strong as in Prince (for example ACID2 fails), however it provides browser like viewer and has XSLT processor.
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