Re: DSSSL Books

[Tony Graham <tgraham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 29 Jun 1999 22:09 -0400, Leonard Stiles wrote:
 > Can anybody recommend any introductory DSSSL books (are there any?!) or SGML
 > books which contain information on DSSSL?

There aren't any DSSSL books, as is frequently noted on this list.

Didier has mentioned "SGML at Work", which seems to be the best
printed introduction.  It works through a complete example.

"XML Black Book" has a chapter on DSSSL.  It includes statements like:
"DSSSL recognizes that a document can be processed in several
different ways, including: Transformation, Formatting, Querying,
Expression" and "a DSSSL stylesheet written for the HTML 3.2
specification by Jon Bosak, one of the two creators of CSS."  If you
don't need the book, you can have a good laugh at this point, and if
you do need the book, you're in trouble.

"XML in Plain English" also has a chapter on DSSSL.  It's not strong
on explanation or examples, but it does document each of the flow
object classes and properties in DSSSL-O.  For each property, it lists
its purpose, syntax (with explanation of the possible values), usage
notes, and related characteristics.  If you don't understand
"Specifies the size of the margin following the row in the direction
in which the table row fills the table." as the purpose of
cell-after-row-margin, then you're in trouble with this book.  The
book does have a useful table of "If you want to:"-"Use this
characteristic" pairs.

"XML Complete" has a chapter on DSSSL.  I don't recommend it.

The "XML Part 3:[NOT YET] Version 1.0" document by Jon Bosak is
essentially the last version of the DSSSL-O subset.  It's a useful
quick reference for what you should and shouldn't expect to be
supported by current DSSSL engines.  Copies are at
http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/xs970522-ps.zip and
http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/xs970522-rtf.zip

I have added this information to the DSSSL auto-faq at
http://trisome.com/auto_faq/Jade_Dsssl/

Regards,


Tony Graham
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