With CSS Languishing, the W3C Comes Up With New Style Sheets

Computergram International, June 30, 1999

Though its Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) remain a bone of contention between web developers and browser vendors, the ever- hopeful World Wide Web Consortium has released Associating Style Sheets with XML Documents as a Recommendation. Recommendation status means the spec is stable, contributes to web interoperability and has been reviewed by W3C members, who favor its adoption by industry. It doesn't, however, guarantee that industry will adopt it.

Hence the fuss over CSS, which has been around since 1996 and which content developers badly want, as it would make their jobs much easier. Instead of providing CSS support, however, Microsoft chose to implement the still-experimental Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) in Internet Explorer 5.0. Standards are great for end users and for vendors with a minority market share, but they're a mixed blessing for a company like Microsoft, which enjoys the lion's share of the browser market and which would like to have proprietary lock-in if it can get it. So, optimistic as the W3C still is, don't expect to see Internet Explorer associating style sheets with XML documents any time soon.