Styling XML Documents with CSS: Enhancing XML Presentation (with Considerations)

Explore using CSS to style XML documents, understanding its limitations and the recommended approach (XSLT). This tutorial demonstrates applying CSS styles to XML, explaining the necessary steps (using processing instructions), and emphasizing the best practice of using XSLT for XML styling.

Styling XML Documents with CSS

While CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is primarily used for styling HTML documents, it can also be applied to XML documents to control their visual presentation. However, it's important to note that CSS is not the standard or recommended way to style XML. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommends using XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) for styling XML.

Linking XML and CSS

To apply CSS styles to an XML document, you need to link the CSS stylesheet to the XML document using the `type` attribute in the `` processing instruction within the XML document's prolog:

<?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="mystyles.css"?>

Example: Styling an XML Document with CSS

(Note: This example requires creating CSS, DTD and XML files. Screenshots of the files and the output are present in the original text, but they cannot be included here. Please refer to the original document for visual verification of the example. The descriptions below aim to convey the information in those screenshots.)

This example demonstrates styling an XML file (`employee.xml`) using a CSS stylesheet (`cssemployee.css`) and a Document Type Definition (DTD) file (`employee.dtd`).

`cssemployee.css` (CSS Stylesheet)

employee {
  background-color: pink;
}
firstname, lastname, email {
  font-size: 25px;
  display: block;
  color: blue;
  margin-left: 50px;
}

`employee.dtd` (DTD File)

(The original text includes the content of the DTD file. Since we cannot display the file here, please refer to the original document for the DTD file content.)

`employee.xml` (XML File)

<?xml-stylesheet type="text/css" href="cssemployee.css"?>
<!DOCTYPE employee SYSTEM "employee.dtd">
<employee>
  <firstName>Vimal</firstName>
  <lastName>Jaiswal</lastName>
  <email>vimal@tutorialsarena.com</email>
</employee>

Test it Now

Using XSLT (Recommended)

While this example demonstrates using CSS with XML, the W3C recommends using XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) for styling XML. XSLT is a more powerful and flexible technology specifically designed for transforming XML documents.