Question

I know that CSS can be used to control the presentation of (X)HTML in modern browsers. I was under the impression that this was possible for arbitrary XML as well. (Am I mistaken?)

A concrete example: given the following XML

<log>   <entry revision='1'>     <author>J Random Hacker</author>     <message>Some pithy explanation</message>   </entry> </log> 

I’d like to associate a CSS with this XML such that when viewed in a modern (WebKit, FireFox) browser, I see something like:

+----------------------------------+ | revision | 1                     | +----------------------------------+ | author   | J Random Hacker       | +----------------------------------+ | message  | Some pithy explanation| +----------------------------------+ 

Where my oh-so-beautiful ascii-art is meant to indicate some table-like layout.

That is: XML+CSS –> ‘pixels for user’ instead of XML+XSLT –> XHTML+CSS –> ‘pixels for user’.

My hope is that this approach could be simpler way (for me) to present XML documents that are already document-like in their structure. I’m also just plain curious.

Answer 1

It is indeed possible to use CSS to format an XML document.

W3 schools example

(The W3C do recommend using xslt to do this sort of thing instead CSS though)