SGML: DSSSL and HTML

Subject: Re: Alternatives to Pitting CSS Against DSSSL

Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 12:46:00 +0000

From: James Clark <jjc@jclark.com>

Newsgroups: comp.text.sgml



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Paul Prescod wrote:

> Can the same DSSSL style sheet be processed on the server
> or the client depending on the needs of the situation?

Yes.  The key to making this work is to use the DSSSL style language for
transforming into HTML, not the DSSSL transformation language.  A DSSSL
style language engine can generate HTML as one of its output formats, just
like it generates, say, RTF.  (Until CSS becomes widespread it will probably
need to output two flavours of HTML: Netscape HTML and HTML with CSS STYLE
attributes.)Each scroll flow object corresponds to a separate HTML document,
and each linkflow object to an A element with an HREF attribute.  This
allows a DSSSL style sheet to be used to transform a large SGML document
that employs normal SGML ID/IDREF linking mechanisms into a large number
of small HTML documents with automatic TOCs and other navigation aids
and with links turned into URLs.

The same style sheet, or a small delta on it, can be used by browsers
that support SGML and DSSSL natively.

For a *very* preliminary demo of this idea, you can look at
http://www.jclark.com/dsssl/split/split.dsl, which was used to generate
the web rooted at http://www.jclark.com/dsssl/split/dsssl-0.html from
the SGML source of the DSSSL standard.

James