Re: [xml-dev] XML and CSS

[Jesper Tverskov <jesper.tverskov@gmail.com>]

I think PrinceXML is a good example of when XML+CSS can be useful. But
except that we have files like RSS, I find it a bad idea to use CSS to
style XML for the web to make it look like HTML/XHTML.

The browsers don't have a default stylesheet to use. When you use
XHTML you only need to style what you want to be different from the
default stylesheet in the browser. When styling your own XML you must
style everything yourself.

Also search engines benefit from a known markup language like XHTML:
Headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, making it easier to put special
importance to content, judged from how it is marked-up. Using your own
markup, it is much more difficult for a search engine like Google to
tell headings, tables, lists, etc, apart.

Also screen readers used by blind people, etc, read the source code.
Homegrown markup, making sense when displayed with CSS in a browser,
is meaningless in a screen reader not knowing when to announce
"title", "ordered list of 5 items", heading, table, etc, to make a
webpage easier to understand when read aloud.

Cheers,
Jesper Tverskov