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Paul Prescod's Home Page
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1. What is DSSSL?
DSSSL is the Document Style Semantics and Specification Language and is meant to work with SGML, the Standard Generalized Markup Language. Those acronyms are sufficiently complex that you may already be worried that this is Rocket Science and that you will not be able to figure them out. Don't Panic. If you do not know about SGML, start by reading my SGML Introduction and the Text Encoding Initiative's Gentle Introduction to SGML . It is not too complicated.
DSSSL is an international standard for associating processing with SGML documents. As you know, SGML itself is intended to allow the complete separation of the content of a document (text, structure, links), from the processing to be associated with it (usually formatting). So where a Word for Windows, Tex, or even LaTeX document would describe what a document looks like (in other words how a printer should "process" it), SGML documents would only describe the structure. Using DSSSL you can describe the processing of documents in a standard way. Since the two most common forms of document processing are formatting and transformation, DSSSL standardised these two processes first. Others may follow as they are needed. The first two are very powerful and many believe that DSSSL will "transform" (sorry) the world of SGML document processing.
1.1 The parts of the DSSSL Standard
DSSSL is divided into many different parts. This means that even if a part of the standard does not meet your current needs, the rest might.
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