HTML Style sheets

This page contains pointers to information about style sheets in the context of HTML. Many of them point into the archives of www-html, which is the mailing list where discussions take place.

• 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. When Robert Raisch left O'Reilly, Pei Wei inherited the issue and came up with this, 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
• DSSSL: Document Style Semantics and Specification Language. A meta-language for specifying style sheet languages that is coming out of the SGML community. The specification is available in SGML and PostScript (large).
• DSSSL-Lite is an initiative to define a subset of DSSSL as a basis for a common style sheet language. Draft and examples.
• 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
• 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's still worth a look. Syntax is based on SGML.
• 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
• Bert Bos' Stream-based Stylesheet Proposal. This proposal borrows from -- and comments -- several of the other proposals.
• Pages, a company whose products allow you to create styled HTML documents.
• Navisoft, a company whose products transmit Style Maps over the web.

• Style sheets should provide a mapping between HTML elements and presentation parameters
• Style sheets provide hints that the browser may or may not take into account when rendering documents
• Both the author and the user should be able to influence the final presentation
• Style sheets should be referenced from the HTML documents, not included. Perhaps they even should be in the HTTP header?

• Should style sheets be HTML-specific or SGML-generic?
• Basis to use for syntax: SGML or our own little language?
• Should style sheets mix?
• Should style sheets include logic?
• To what extent should the final presentation be predictable?

Other approaches to putting style on the web

• HyperTeX
• Adobe Acrobat
• Netscape's HTML extensions