> I'm researching about half a dozen CMS's for a project, and > thought I had found my answer with Lenya. I thought I could use > xml for my source documents (content), and xsl/xslt for > transformation (presentation), but I keep seeing references to > CSS's, and sometimes scripting languages. In fact, Lenya doc's > say, "as much as possible we use css's for presentation". I > thought xslt was an improvement over CSS's. Why have xslt > available and then use CSS's? Is it that you can't do > "presentation" with xslt? I'm guessing there must be a reason > to use CSS's. Can someone give me a quick overview of why CSS's > are necessary?
Well, CSS is actually the part that does the presentation, while XSLT is the part that does the transformation of the basic XML into something you need, like HTML or XHTML in Lenya's most prominent example. See, it kinda breaks down like this: 1. Your data Your data is in some standardized XML format. That format could be just basic XML tags, or it could be part of a more standardized library of XML tags, like SVG, or RSS, or pretty much anything. 2. Transformation of data XSLT is great for transforming one bit of standard XML tags into another. So, if you have an RSS file, you can use XSLT to transform that RSS into XHTML to be displayed as a webpage. In the case of Lenya, you take the XML files used to store the data and transform it into a different structure: XHTML. Remember, this is only structure. While you could certainly include font tags and other presentational HTML tags in your transformation using XSLT, the general guideline is to convert to strict semantic HTML markup: markup that describes the data in your webpage as best as possible, avoiding any tags or attributes that define the style of that content. 3. Presentation And this is where CSS jumps in. Now that you've converted your XML data to semantically correct XHTML markup, you can use class="" or id="" attributes you've assigned to your XHTML tags to create CSS that defines how that piece of content on your page will be displayed. So, if you have a paragraph tag created in number 2 above, you can now have a CSS file that defines a paragraph's style as indented and having a bottom margin of 10 pixels. Hopefully that gives a detailed overview of the ideal way you want to be using the technologies available for use in Lenya, and specifically the role of CSS. Feel free to keep posting questions on your possible use of Lenya. Jon
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