SGML: DSSSL and HTML

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
=================================================================== 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