ABSTRACT

Help is at hand - XML supports the Cascading Style Sheet mechanism to add aesthetic appeal to pages. CSS is a system seen widely on the Web. In the past a graphic designer would build a page for a web site with tags to describe its colours, fonts and so on. To build a similar page, much time had to be spent recoding the same set-up. Now imagine if that designer was working for a newspaper and her employers announced they wanted all of their 10,000 archive stories to have the same page design. Doing this by hand would be a nightmare. Enter Cascading Style Sheets. Now all the web designer has to do is work out the relevant look of a page and transpose this into a set of rules (titles are always be blue, hyperlinks are underlined, the background colour is white ... ) known as a stylesheet. A line referencing the stylesheet is added to each HTML page, so when that page is called the stylesheet rules take precedence and the entire site shares a consistent look.