RE: About multiple output documents from a single XML/SGML processed document

["Didier PH Martin" <martind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Christof,


Christof said:
"We" are? All I remember is that we were discussing the meaning of query
construction rules, you suggested some sort of extension to the semantics,
someone mentioned that DSSSL would be undergoing ISO review in a little
while, and suddenly the word DSSSL-2 started floating around.

Didier says:
We are for the moment different ISO committee. As James Masson already said
in this list. USA, Canada and Japan ISO committe expressed the will to
continue the support of DSSSL and to be active participant to discussions,
comments, modifications, submission and acceptance of the specs (search in
this group archives for James' message and you'll find precisely what he
said). More particularly, Canada expressed the interest to work on the
edition of the DSSSL-2 specs. And again, as a member of the Canadian ISO
committee, I expressed the will to write and pursue the DSSSL-2 efforts. I
said we, because the ISO process is not solely the trip of a single person
but the result of a collective work. What I am doing now, is to collect
needs, suggestions, problems. In some words to collect the collective
experience of the people who used Jade/OpenJade to feed this wisdom into the
next draft specifications. This wisdom or this "tacit" knowledge will then
be made explicit in a draft document. Instead of writing a draft from my own
notes (and believe me, I have in them a lot of stuff), I choused to work
with people in the list so that their knowledge and wisdom could be included
in the written words of the draft.

Didier said:
> That DSSSL is not any more an interesting fossil but a
> living organism and the next step is the new draft specification. This new
> draft specification should not be a simple photocopy of DSSSL-1
> but can and preferable should include new improvements and not solely
minor
> specifications corrections.

Christof said:
What exactly are the changes that are on the table for DSSSL-2?

Didier says:
We are at the beginning of the process. After the Montreal presentations
(XML-dev conference where OpenJade is presented to the XML community and
where I'll have an occasion to collect feedback form this community) I'll
write a to do list that will aggregate the work of several people who wrote
about their views of DSSSL-2, I'll also integrate what we learned also from
the XML world (as the XML world learned from James Clark and others what we
learned in the SGML world), try some synthesis (I have to do this anyway
because I am writing a book about XML and this includes a chapter about XML
style and processing, and, I talk in this section about XSL, CSS and DSSSL).
Up to now, we have to take into consideration some problems to resolve in
this DSSSL-2 specs

a) transformation based on templates (suggested by some members of this list
as a way to resolve some problems and this do not replace the transformation
part of DSSSL-1, just complements it)
b) multiple input/single output (we get that), single input/multiple output
(we do not get that for page oriented rendition). Also, the notion of output
document has been left out of DSSSL-1, DSSSL-2 could provide more guidelines
(for instance, in one case, a scroll object is associated to a file and in
one case the simple-page-sequence is associated to a page context- this kind
of ambiguities could be resolved by guidelines or notes added to the specs
or by new constructs).

There is more, but these (and more particularly the second problem) is not
well addressed by DSSSL-1. The first item is the result of people who played
with template based language and found that in some circumstances, templates
lead to simpler constructs. There is probably a way to harmoniously
integrate procedural and template based notations (because of the SGML
nature of a DSSSL script).

Outside of this community I got feedback of needs not yet addressed by XSLT
or DSSSL. The need to process incoming XML document and linkage to data
storages. What we have now is mostly outgoing processing and style. So we
address quite well rendition but not processing. Some people made the
comment that rule based processing for incoming e-commerce documents (XML
based) may be quite useful. One person evewn talked about data objects or
storage objects, This has the virtue to isolate proprietary APIs by standard
object and have an explicit way to transform XML/SGMNL elements or fragments
into data. Concreate implementations can map these objects to real data
entities (tables or rows in relational data bases, objects in directory
services, object in object data bases).

I do not say that this is formally on the table, what we have now is
suggestions, needs, expression of non resolved problems. My intention is to
first start from unresolved problems (or problems resolved with an expensive
process) and then start from there for the next step. So, to prepare a draft
proposal or a work document well grounded in people's problems and needs.

regards
Didier PH Martin
mailto:martind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.netfolder.com


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