Re: [xml-dev] Where is XML going
David,
CSS by itself is insufficient for presentation for all but the most well structured of documents. HTML works well with CSS because HTML has a structural ordering that works well with the CSS model (as to be expected, given that CSS evolved in response to HTML). Some years ago I wrote a couple of chapters for a book on XML and CSS, showing how you can apply CSS to XML, but as I proved back even then, very, very few XML schemas are in fact even remotely appropriate for direct presentation with CSS.
What about XSLT? Here things get a little more interesting. You can bind an XSLT to an XML document to perform client-side rendering. The most obvious mechanism is through the use of the ?xml-stylesheet PI. Unfortunately once past this AJAX-based transformations become somewhat trickier, because while there may be support for an XSLT transformation API within a browser, such support is far from uniform.
Personally, I'd like to see an inline <transform> tag in HTML5:
<transform
stylesheet="xs:anyURI"