Re: Scheme Programming Reference

Subject: Re: Scheme Programming Reference
From: "Jack Fitzpatrick" <jfitzpatrick@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 15:55:27 +0000
> Adam Di Carlo wrote:
> I think a DSSSL book should be written similarly.  Don't actually
> teach Scheme per se, but just introduce the bits of syntax one by one,
> explaining as you go.  Keep the user focussed on the problem of how to
> render documents.  I think such an interative, approach, starting very
> simply and working up to complex DSSSL examples, would work quite
> well.

I agree with Adam.  My name's not Jane, but judging from many of the earlier
responses on this thread, not to mention the general content of this list, I
suspect that I may be more representative of the rare "everyman" DSSSL
constituency, rather than the frequent posters.  We are the people who do
general business applications programming, not just document processing,
though we periodically need to process documents in some fashion.  We
haven't
read Knuth, and we don't really give a damn about the theoretical and
socio-political foundations of DSSSL.  We have no interest in maintaining a
DSSSL mystique.  Like it or not, we are the ones that you have to reach for
a
broader market acceptance of DSSSL. Here is the nature of our DSSSL
experience:

1.  *ML is presented as part of a solution to a business problem, but we
need
    to style and paginate it.  We're somewhat familiar with *ML. Perhaps we
    can even read a DTD.  We've used HTML/CSS enough to know that it won't
    work for us, but we've never heard of DSSSL.

2.  We surf the Web and see some DSSSL links.  This stuff might be the
answer.
    Aha, there's the spec, and it's ISO--not any of that W3C vapor!  "I'm
not
    very familiar with SGML, but I'm a reasonably bright person, with a
    broad programming background, I'll just sit down with a reference book,
    load some software, and I'll be doing basic DSSSL in a couple of weeks,
    max.  No problem--that's how I learned Perl and Java."

3.  Reality sets in.  What the heck is Scheme?  What's all of this
    unfathomable grove business?  SGML architectures, HyTime?  (Sigh) aren't
    there any DSSSL books available at Amazon.com?  Is Jade all there is for
    software?  "Oh, it looks like I can produce PDF using TeX.  I downloaded
    TeX once, but couldn't get it to do anything.  (Whine) can't I just use
    Crystal Reports or something else instead of messing with *ML?"

4.  Nope. We download the Jade binaries and read, and reread, James' terse
    (to be kind) documentation, find some sample style sheets, subscribe to
    the DSSSL list, read a Scheme book, read some brief DSSSL tutorials on
    the Web, go to an XML conference where we ask some members of this list
a
    bunch of questions for which we don't understand the answers, and
finally
    try to find a consultant who can save us from all of this pain.

5.  Several months later, through shear perseverance, the fog finally begins
    to clear enough that we begin to put together a working application.  We
    discover that it's actually quite simple, once you get past all the
    mumbo jumbo and balky software!  And low and behold, it mostly does just
    what we want it to do (look Ma, no HTML!).

    - or -

5.  Several months later, we've still gotten nowhere, and our boss assigns
us
    to another project.

Some of you might get a chuckle from this at my expense, but I suspect there
are many others, less persistent than me, who never got past step 3, and
that's a shame.  I think that this situation is improving due to the
tireless
efforts of people like Didier and Paul.  But people like me need a little
more
hand-holding in order to be able to get "real world" work done quickly from
a
standing start:

1. We need "The DSSSL Homepage"--the starting point from which you go from
   "What's DSSSL?" to "How do I extend OpenJade?".  Didier appears to have
   a good start on that Web page, and OpenJade is a very promising
initiative.

2. We need turnkey Windows software, that produces page description language
   directly, with a tutorial and good sample code.  Perhaps Ralph's Hybrick
   will get us there eventually, but I couldn't get it to work for me in its
   current incarnation.

3. We need a readable reference, as Adam suggests, with lots of examples
   showing source and output. Barnes and Noble would display it right next
to
   the XML books.  On the cover, it says something like, "Forget CSS, forget
   XSL, forget DOM, just use DSSSL and be the master of your XML documents".

Hmmm, maybe there _could_ be a market for a good reference ... but DSSSL?
Give me a break!  Even the name smacks of elitism. If ISO drops DSSSL, does
that mean that we're free to rename it?

Jack Fitzpatrick
speaking for myself, not ADP



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