Re: (dsssl) The future of DSSSL

[Brandon Ibach <bibach@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Quoting G. Ken Holman <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> This is an admirable effort to establish priorities for furthering the 
> implementation of OpenJade.
> 
> 
> But now you have switched gears to talk about DSSSL and not about OpenJade.
> 
> 
> The appropriate forum to talk about the future of an ISO standard is 
> through the ISO itself by participating in your country's representative 
> committee to ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34.  Canadians interested in doing so are 
> welcome to contact me as I am the chairman of Canada's representative 
> committee.  Presently, Japanese representatives have been most active on 
> the maintenance and progression of the DSSSL standard, having already 
> released an amendment.  There is a commercial implementation of complex 
> page geometry for DSSSL from Next Solution http://www.NextSolution.co.jp in 
> Japan, and I know their engineer who is active with standards issues.
> 
> As for the future of OpenJade, it will certainly be interesting to hear the 
> results of your discussion.
> 
   I may not have made myself entirely clear.  My goal is to discuss
the future of *implementation* of DSSSL, as it is now, not to discuss
how the standard should be revised or amended.  If people with
real-life applications think there are things missing from DSSSL,
there's always the option of implementing non-standard extensions (as
has been done in Jade/OpenJade) as a means of proving the value of
such an addition.
   Jade/OpenJade represents the only freely available implementation
of DSSSL (at least, the only one in a form that's readily usable), and
it only implements a fraction of the standard.  To have it implement
the whole standard would be a *huge* job.  The question is, what parts
of the standard would people most like to see get implemented?
   The reason I keep talking about DSSSL, rather than OpenJade, is
because I feel there are certain limitations inherent in the current
design of OpenJade, as well as certain obstacles which have, IMHO,
contributed to the lack of development of certain features.  So,
without spilling the beans too much about some of the things I want to
discuss at the "forum", I have some ideas about how to move forward
with DSSSL development.  Don't worry!  I have no intention of leaving
OpenJade behind and starting over.  Call it a "refactoring". :)
   On another note, I don't suppose that engineer from Next Solution
would be willing to provide some pointers on an overall approach to
implementing the full Page Sequence object in DSSSL, eh?  Believe me,
that feature is high on the list of things I'd like to see get done
(at least in part), if only because it is so often requested.

-Brandon :)

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