JavaScript Style Sheets

JavaScript Style Sheets (JSS), an alternative to CSS proposed by Netscape in 1996. It is only supported by Netscape Navigator 4, having never been supported by Internet Explorer, and with support for it being dropped in Netscape 6+ / Mozilla / Firefox.

JavaScript code is used as a stylesheet, JSS styles individual element by modifying properties of the document.tags object. For example, the CSS:

h1 { font-size: 20pt; }

is equivalent to JSS:

document.tags.H1.fontSize = "20pt";

Note the case significance in tag names.

JSS is in some ways more powerful and in some ways less powerful than CSS. It lacks the various CSS selector features, supporting only a simple tag name selector. On the other hand, since it uses a full programming language to write stylesheets, stylesheets can include highly complex dynamic calculations and conditional processing. (In practice, in CSS, these are achieved by using Javascript to modify the CSS applicable to the document at runtime.)

Due to being written in JavaScript, JSS stylesheets are less friendly than CSS stylesheets to the non-programmer.

See also

• List of stylesheet languages
• Comparison of stylesheet languages

External links

• Chapter 13 - 13.4 JavaScript Style Sheets