Re: Is DSSSL Hard?

["Henry S. Thompson" <ht@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Further to Paul's comments about DSSSL and CSS, here's something I
showed at WWW6.  This is actually all but the first line of something,
which follows after the page break -- have a guess as to what it is,
before scrolling onwards:

---------------------------
p [ space-after: .3cm ]
h1 [ font-weight: bold ]
title [ space-after: .2cm
         font-weight: bold
         quadding: center ]

hr |rule]
---------------------------





------------------
<!doctype style-sheet SYSTEM "sdss-sheet.dtd">&sdss;
------------------

It's actually a fully valid DSSSL specification file, works with JADE.
Of course there's a man behind the curtain:  the dtd is the standard
one as shipped with JADE, plus some [gasp!] SHORTREFS:

<!ENTITY begin.crule "(element ">
<!ENTITY begin.pmake "(make paragraph&#13;">
<!ENTITY begin.make "(make ">
<!ENTITY end.make "))&#13;&#13;">
<!ENTITY sdss SYSTEM "sdss-basic.dsl">
<!SHORTREF bm "&#RS" begin.crule
              "|" begin.make
              "[" begin.pmake
              "]" end.make>
<!USEMAP bm style-specification-body>

and the included entity defines a bunch of symbols and gets things
started:

(root (make simple-page-sequence (make scroll)))(define bold 'bold)(define center 'center)

The point is of course NOT that you should actually do this (for one
thing the use of a shortref on record start makes the document a bit
difficult to work with), but that there is an isomorphism between
simple DSSSL and CSS, and that it would be a straightforward matter to
define an alternative NOTATION for DSSSL which responded to this.

ht