Re: DSSSL Documentation Project

[Tony Graham <tgraham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 19 Jan 1998 11:25 -0500, Paul Prescod wrote:
 > I think many of us are concerned about the fact that a year from now,
 > DSSSL may be radically different than it is today...the XSL proposal
 > suggests that DSSSL should have *two* syntaxes and a whole pile of new
 > flow objects. I personally would be more confident about contributing
 > more if I knew what was going to change and what wasn't.

The XSL Note proposes "extensions to the flow object tree construction
language" and "new flow object classes to support formatting
functionality necessary for the Web."  It also proposes incorporating
"the subset of DSSSL flow object classes and characteristics that was
specified in DSSSL-O."

Of course a lot may change between the Note and what XSL finally
becomes but it does seem that the constants are the dsssl-o flow
objects and their characteristics and the techniques to get from
markup to a flow object tree.  The syntax may change, but the mindset
remains the same, even when you're working with a different set of
flow objects.

I took Henry Thompson's XSL tutorial at the end of SGML/XML'97, and my
lack of trouble with the exercises had less to do with familiarity
with XSL syntax or CSS flow objects (since it was the first time I'd
used either) than it had to do with knowing how to string together
per-element rules and flow objects and their characteristics (and
remembering to use capital letters in place of dashes in function
names).

I don't think that the DSSSL documentation effort should stop and hold
its breath until XSL is finished.  Scheme tutorials are a bit passe
right now perhaps but stuff on the dsssl-o flow objects and the tips
and techniques for using them is both useful now and, it appears,
will be useful in an XSL context.

The outline for the DSSSL Handbook is at
http://www.mulberrytech.com/dsssl/dsssldoc/handbook.html.  Some of it
is not so useful in an XSL-only world, but I do think that the
outlined chapters 15 and 18-20 are useful both for working with DSSSL
and for working with XSL.  (Ben, how about chapter 18?)

Regards,


Tony Graham
=======================================================================
Tony Graham
Mulberry Technologies, Inc.                         Phone: 301-315-9632
17 West Jefferson Street, Suite 207                 Fax:   301-315-8285
Rockville, MD USA 20850                 email: tgraham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
=======================================================================


 DSSSList info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/dsssl/dssslist