Re: Jade/DSSSL future

[Brandon Ibach <bibach@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Quoting James Clark <jjc@xxxxxxxxxx>:
> > I would agree, but there is an intermediate gray area. TeX, for
> > instance, can clearly do far more than the DSSSSL subset in Jade
> > allows for, but cannot do the theoretical full page sequence
> > stuff. how do we realistically harness the  rich intermediate level?
> 
> This is a defect in the design of DSSSL.  The lesson has been learnt and
> the XSL 1.0 is providing a level of functionality less than the full
> generality of the DSSSL page-sequence but much more than the DSSSL
> simple-page-sequence.
> 
   So, dare I suggest it, what would it take to adapt this
intermediate level of functionality into a new (set of, I'd guess)
DSSSL FOs that would fall between simple-page-sequence and the full
page-sequence?  And at the risk of getting even more ambitious, could
it be designed to be able to potentially "scale up" to encompass some
of the features of the full page-sequence?  In other words, a design
which is flexible enough to allow a limited level of complexity or a
more complex level on par with page-sequence, such that a single model
could be used for the whole range of possibilities.
   Perhaps a place to start would be to identify some of the problem
areas which cause TeX to be unable to handle a full page-sequence, or
is the fundamental design of page-sequence such that it would not be
possible to "scale it back" to something that TeX could manage?

-Brandon :)


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