Re: DSSSL and WYSIWYG Editing

[James Clark <jjc@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 10:31 05/05/97 -0700, Greg Kostello wrote:
>The my desire to understand DSSSL, I've read through a number of the
>online documents but the only application I've worked with so far is
>Jade. What I'm trying to find is examples of WYSIWYG editors using DSSSL
>or any variant of DSSSL.

I don't know of any yet.

>All the examples and documents I've seen about DSSSL seem to support a
>process oriented approach where a source document (or series of source
>documents) is transformed into result document (or series of documents)
>and then the resulting document is processed again to add style
>characteristics to it.
>
>This leads me to a series of questions:
>Does this process lend itself to WYSIWYG editing?

Yes. Both the style language and the transformation language are designed to
be implementable in a WYSIWYG editor.  This was one of the main motivations
for keeping the expression language free of side-effects.  However there are
some optional features in DSSSL that I think it would be hard for a WYSIWYG
editor to support (notably the full query language).

Jade doesn't attempt to support editing: I don't think a decent-quality
DSSSL based WYSIWYG XML/SGML editor is something that can be done by a
single person in a reasonable time-frame.

>Is the transformation language part of the specification necessary to
>supporting the other parts of DSSSL?

No.

>Does the DSSSL Online specification, which mainly goes into detail about
>style characteristics, also require a transformation of the original
>document into a new document?

No.

James


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