process specification elements

[Matthias Clasen <mclasen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 10 Jun 1997, Frank Christoph wrote:

[...]

> Now, you claim that the wording used in international standards is precise.
> I will give you that much.  It is pretty much as precise as vulgar speech
> can be.  But it is certainly neither clear nor succinct.  Let me give you
> two representative examples from our favorite ISO standard.
> 
>   The parts from a sequence of process specification elements consist of
>   the sequence of parts from the first process specification element,
>   followed by the sequence of parts from the next process specification
>   element, and so on.  [7.1]
> 
> I had to read this about three times before I even got an inkling of what
> it means, and then at least once more to figure out that it was not just a
> tautology, but a definition of something called "sequence of process
> specification elements".

[...]

I have read this section (7.1) more than three times, and I am still
confused about it. It says

A user specifies processing of an SGML document by identifying a process
specification element.

but also

The process specification described by a sequence of process specification 
elements is...

So what gives ? Is a process specified by a single process specification 
element, i.e. a style-specification element (as the first sentence seems
to indicate) or by a sequence thereof (as the second seems to indicate).

Also, if I have the following style sheet   

some declarations 1
<style-specification id=x use=y>
  some declarations 2
 <style-specification-body id=body1>
 <style-specification-body id=body2>
<style-specification id=y>
  some declarations 3
  <style-specification-body id=body3>
  <style-specification-body id=body4>

how would the "process specification described by the element x" 
look like in the "parts" language of section 7.1, i.e. in what order
and precedence would the declarations and bodies be evaluated by
the dsssl engine ?   

Regards, Matthias


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