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. The www-style@w3.org mailing list hosts discussions on this topic. Feel free to add yourself or browse the archive.

Hot links

• Life on the bleeding edge is a good introduction to the concept of style sheets and why the web needs them.
• David Siegel presented the Balkanization of the web at the style sheet workshop in Paris in Novembber. The notes from the workshop are also available.
• A recent draft from W3C discusses HTML3 and Style Sheets.
• The W3 Consortium organized a workshop on style sheets in Paris Nov 6-7. The notes are available.
• The Cascading Style Sheets specification is now published as a W3C working draft. Tamaya, an HTML browser/editor has recently added support for CSS. From before, Arena and Emacs-w3 have initial implementations.
• DSSSL: Document Style Semantics and Specification Language. A meta-language for specifying style sheet languages that is coming from the SGML community. The specification is available in SGML and PostScript (large).
• DSSSL Online, previously called DSSSL-Lite is an initiative to define a subset of DSSSL as a basis for a common style sheet language.

Historical Style Sheet proposals

• Robert Raisch's A Style sheet proposal. Ths 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,
• Håkon 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, 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 in on style sheets in general.

Relevant papers

• 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, 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

Relevant Products

• Pages, a company whose products allow you to create styled HTML documents.
• NaviPress, a browser from Navisoft will support style maps.
• Panorama from SoftQuad has a style sheet mechanism
• DynaText from EBT also implents style sheets

Other approaches to putting style on the web

• RFC 1563 defines The text/enriched MIME Content-type.
• HyperTeX
• Adobe Acrobat
• Netscape's HTML2 extensions, HTML3 extensions, color attributes and why you shouldn't use them.
• Alex Hopman's Character Formatting Proposal
• Imagen's Real Times
• Severe Tire Damage
• w3magic
• Common Ground's Digital Paper