JavaScript Style Sheets (JSSS) was a

stylesheet language A style sheet language, or style language, is a computer language that expresses the presentation of structured documents. One attractive feature of structured documents is that the content can be reused in many contexts and presented in various w ...

technology proposed by

Netscape Communications Netscape Communications Corporation (originally Mosaic Communications Corporation) was an American independent computer services company with headquarters in Mountain View, California and then Dulles, Virginia. Its Netscape web browser was onc ...

in 1996 to provide facilities for defining the presentation of webpages. It was an alternative to the

Cascading Style Sheets Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...

(CSS) technology. Although Netscape submitted it to the

World Wide Web Consortium The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...

(W3C), the technology was never accepted as a formal standard and it never gained acceptance in the

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

market. Only

Netscape Communicator Netscape Communicator (or ''Netscape 4'') is a discontinued Internet suite produced by Netscape Communications Corporation, and was the fourth major release in the Netscape line of browsers. It was first in beta in 1996 and was released in June 1 ...

4 implemented JSSS, with rival

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...

choosing not to implement the technology. Soon after Netscape Communicator's release in 1997, Netscape stopped promoting JSSS, instead focusing on the rival CSS standard, which was also supported by Internet Explorer and had a much wider industry acceptance. The follow-up to Netscape Communicator,

Netscape 6 Netscape 6 is a discontinued Internet suite developed by Netscape Communications Corporation, and was the sixth major release of the Netscape series of browsers. It superseded Netscape Communicator (4.x), as the release of Netscape Communicator ...

(released in 2000), dropped support for JSSS. It now remains little more than a historical footnote, with

web developers A web developer is a programmer who develops World Wide Web applications using a client–server model. The applications typically use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in the client, and any general-purpose programming language in the server. is used f ...

generally unaware of its previous existence. The proposal did not become a W3C standard.

Syntax

Using

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

code as a stylesheet, JSSS styles individual element by modifying properties of a document.tags object. For example, the CSS: h1 is equivalent to the JSSS: document.tags.H1.fontSize = "20pt"; JSSS element names are case sensitive. JSSS lacks the various CSS selector features, supporting only simple tag name, class and id selectors. On the other hand, since it is written using a complete

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

, stylesheets can include highly complex dynamic calculations and conditional processing. (In practice, however, this can be achieved using

to modify the stylesheets applicable to the document at runtime.) Because of this JSSS was often used in the creation of dynamic web pages.

Example

The following example shows part of the source code of an HTML-document: Similar to

, JSSS could be used in a tag. This example shows two different methods to select tags.

Browser support

Javascript Style Sheets were only supported by Netscape 4.x (4.0–4.8) but no later versions. No other

has ever integrated JSSS.

References

External links

Netscape's JavaScript-Based Style Sheets submission to the W3C
{{W3C standards Style Sheets Scripting languages Stylesheet languages Web design Computer-related introductions in 1996