Comparing XSL and CSS

XSL and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) have similar goals, and it's useful to compare them. XSL is more powerful than CSS in many ways, but it's also more complex. XSL and CSS are not competitors. For some common applications (like HTML+ documents that use mostly HTML but have a few extra non-HTML tags thrown in), CSS will be the easiest solution. For others, the manipulative power of XSL will be required.

Although very different, XSL and CSS have two things in common: Each provides a mechanism for selecting elements and for specifying how the selected elements are to be presented. CSS uses selectors and properties in this way:

selector { properties; }

XSL uses patterns and formatting objects: