How do I control formatting and appearance?

In HTML, default styling was built into the browsers because the tagset of HTML was predefined and hardwired into browsers. In XML, where you can define your own tagset, browsers cannot possibly be expected to guess or know in advance what names you are going to use and what they will mean, so you need a stylesheet if you want to display formatted text.

Browsers which read XML will accept and use a CSS stylesheet at a minimum, but you can also use the more powerful XSLT stylesheet language to transform your XML into HTML—which browsers, of course, already know how to display (and that HTML can still use a CSS stylesheet). This way you get all the document management benefits of using XML, but you don't have to worry about your readers needing XML smarts in their browsers.

As with any system where files can be viewed at random by arbitrary users, the author cannot know what resources (such as fonts) are on the user's system, so the same care is needed as with HTML using fonts. To invoke a stylesheet from an XML file for standalone processing in the browser, include one of the stylesheet declarations:






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