Re: DSSSL and WYSIWYG Editing

> Does the DSSSL Online specification, which mainly goes into detail about
> style characteristics, also require a transformation of the original
> document into a new document?

I wanted to clarify something:

SGML (or HTML) documents look like this: "<b>bold</b>" and a 
style sheet process must will convert the "<b>" into bolding, so 
I think that any SGML style sheet language does a transformation 
from the SGML input to the presentational output. The question 
is basically how complex that transformation can be. DSSSL's can 
be very advanced. 

The basic paradigm of DSSSL-O is a transformation from a
structured document to a graphical presentation of the document (but
this transformation does not use the transformation language). 

 
> All the examples and documents I've seen about DSSSL seem to support a
> process oriented approach where a source document (or series of source
> documents) is transformed into result document (or series of documents)
> and then the resulting document is processed again to add style
> characteristics to it.

Actually, very few examples that I have seen use this structure. Most do
a single transformation directly from SGML structure to presentational
structures. There is no processing again to add style characteristics:
that's the point of the style transformation.
 
> Is the transformation language part of the specification necessary to
> supporting the other parts of DSSSL?

No. In fact Jade does not support it. Note that the "transformation
language" is a very specific tool for doing transformations from SGML to
SGML. It can be used in a stylesheet to do some structural
transformation before the presentational transformation (in the style
language) is applied. It is not currently used much because it is not
supported by Jade.

 Paul Prescod

Received on Monday, 5 May 1997 21:52:11 UTC