Multipurpose Web publishing using HTML, XML, and CSS
Håkon Wium Lie, Janne Saarela · Communications of the ACM · 1999
ince its conception in the early 1990s, the Web has become a critical component in the strategic thinking of content providers around the world.But targeting the Web as the delivery vehicle for content poses several questions, including: How should the publishing process change to take advantage of the Web? and How should content be represented to support device independence, searchability, and efficient network throughput?The protocols and data formats in use on the Web constitute a framework within which applications and services can be built.Emerging Web standards can be used to implement multipurpose publishing, where the same content is presented on a range of Web devices. 1 We discuss three specifications in some detail-the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the eXtensible Markup Language (XML), and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).All three can help content providers face some of the most important challenges of delivering content on the Web: