Re: (dsssl) identity transforms in Jade

Subject: Re: (dsssl) identity transforms in Jade
From: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 13:07:37 -0400
At 01/07/17 12:08 -0400, Karl Critz wrote:
What you need is a stylesheet for formatting objects that
formats them as DSSSL flow objects.  That's not going to be trivial for
full support, since there are a few differences in the formatting model,

Yup, I didn't mean a strict identity, but rather an XSL-FO to DSSSL FO translator.

I started writing X2D (XSL to DSSSL) and quickly determined that it was a non-starter. It was a DSSSL stylesheet interpreting instances of FO, theoretically to take advantage of existing DSSSL processors to implement all of XSLFO. It was announced at GCA's SGML/XML Japan'98 conference in September, 1998, but did not last long after that when I ran into the roadblocks that seemed insurmountable at the time.


The problem I found is that the semantics were sufficiently different that an arms-length implementation using DSSSL would never produce the desired result except in only very simple cases that lead to the project in the first place. At that time I determined the interpretation needed to be more intimate with the point-in-time rendering than provided by the DSSSL flow object tree. The rendering needs to know far more detailed information about the current state of the format process than can be expressed in DSSSL semantics.

But if I could be shown to be wrong, then I think people would be interested in such a DSSSL stylesheet.

.................... Ken


-- G. Ken Holman mailto:gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Crane Softwrights Ltd. http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/d/ Box 266, Kars, Ontario CANADA K0A-2E0 +1(613)489-0999 (Fax:-0995) Web site: XSL/XML/DSSSL/SGML/OmniMark services, training, products. Book: Practical Transformation Using XSLT and XPath ISBN 1-894049-06-3 Article: What is XSLT? http://www.xml.com/pub/2000/08/holman/index.html Next public instructor-led training: 2001-08-12,08-13,09-19,10-01, - 10-04,10-22,10-29,02-02

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