RE: Nostradamus (was Re: FO. lists as tables)

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

Hi Schafer,

Your comment about the spec is appropriate, it is generally the case that
W3C specs are easier to understand than their ISO counterpart. W3C specs
contain examples which help to understand. Also, because W3C has a lot of
mindshare, publishers and uthors are producing books that simplify even more
the original specs by providing even more explainations. DSSSL specs
suffered from several illness:

a) a spec without examples and a hard access for the average programmer
b) a lack of support from the publishing community. There is no books on
DSSSL simply some chapters in some books (chapters is maybe too generous
here).
c) a lack of a good PR and envengelism campain showing that DSSSL could be
as easy as CSS (Paul Prescod made a eloquant demonstration on this subject)
d) people confounding the expression language and the style language saying
that DSSSL is hard to use and learn because the language is Lisp based. If
you use on the style part a la CSS, it is very easy to learn. The
difficulties starts with the expression language but this could be said with
all the constructs now found in XSL, The <> instead of the () do not change
the reality that these kind of declarative language are not so easy to grab
for the main stream. Omnimark or kind of languages like it may be easier to
grasp.

"Your conclusion is that the reason DSSSL was never implemented is
because it is too complicated, too detailed, or too precise. I don't
believe that that's the case at all. It was never implemented because
no one could figure out what the authors were really trying to say.
The DSSSL spec is so caught up in the formalities and definitions that
the message got lost along the way."


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


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