Document Style Semantics and Specification Language

Last updated
Document Style Semantics and Specification Language
Paradigm
Family Scheme

The Document Style Semantics and Specification Language (DSSSL) is an international standard developed to provide stylesheets for SGML documents. [1]

Contents

DSSSL consists of two parts: a tree transformation process that can be used to manipulate the tree structure of documents prior to presentation, and a formatting process that associates the elements in the source document with specific nodes in the target representation—the flow object tree. DSSSL specifications are device-independent pieces of information that can be interchanged between different platforms. DSSSL does not standardize the back-end formatters that generate the language's output. Such formatters may render the output for on-screen display, or write it to a computer file in a specific format (such as PostScript or Rich Text Format). [1]

Based on a subset of the Scheme programming language, it is specified by the standard ISO/IEC 10179:1996. It was developed by ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 (ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Subcommittee 34 - Document description and processing languages). [2] [3]

SGML contains information in a machine-readable but not very human-readable format. A "stylesheet" is used to present the information stored in SGML in a more pleasing or accessible way. DSSSL can convert to a wide range of formats, including RTF, HTML, and LaTeX.

DSSSL is compatible with any SGML-based document type, [1] but it has been used most often with DocBook. In 1997, software engineer Geir Ove Grønmo published a syntax highlighting language definition for KEDIT. [4]

With the appearance of XML as an alternative to SGML, XML's associated stylesheet language XSL was also widely and rapidly adopted, from around 1999. Although DSSSL continued to be in use within the shrinking SGML field, XSL was very soon in use more extensively, and by more coders, than DSSSL had ever achieved. This was emphasised when previous SGML strongholds such as DocBook converted from SGML to XML, and also converted their favoured stylesheet language from DSSSL to XSL.

Sometime in or before 1994, Opera Software began drafting a "DSSSL Lite" specification for the consideration of the World Wide Web Consortium, since DSSSL was thought to be too complex for the World Wide Web. [5]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Markup language</span> Modern system for annotating a document

A markuplanguage is a text-encoding system consisting of a set of symbols inserted in a text document to control its structure, formatting, or the relationship between its parts. Markup is often used to control the display of the document or to enrich its content to facilitate automated processing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Standard Generalized Markup Language</span> Markup language

The Standard Generalized Markup Language is a standard for defining generalized markup languages for documents. ISO 8879 Annex A.1 states that generalized markup is "based on two postulates":

<span class="mw-page-title-main">XML</span> Markup language by the W3C for encoding of data

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. The World Wide Web Consortium's XML 1.0 Specification of 1998 and several other related specifications—all of them free open standards—define XML.

In computing, the term Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is used to refer to a family of languages used to transform and render XML documents.

XSLT is a language originally designed for transforming XML documents into other XML documents, or other formats such as HTML for web pages, plain text or XSL Formatting Objects, which may subsequently be converted to other formats, such as PDF, PostScript and PNG. Support for JSON and plain-text transformation was added in later updates to the XSLT 1.0 specification.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Machine-readable medium and data</span> Medium capable of storing data in a format readable by a machine

In communications and computing, a machine-readable medium is a medium capable of storing data in a format easily readable by a digital computer or a sensor. It contrasts with human-readable medium and data.

DocBook is a semantic markup language for technical documentation. It was originally intended for writing technical documents related to computer hardware and software, but it can be used for any other sort of documentation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Topic map</span> Knowledge organization system

A topic map is a standard for the representation and interchange of knowledge, with an emphasis on the findability of information. Topic maps were originally developed in the late 1990s as a way to represent back-of-the-book index structures so that multiple indexes from different sources could be merged. However, the developers quickly realized that with a little additional generalization, they could create a meta-model with potentially far wider application. The ISO/IEC standard is formally known as ISO/IEC 13250:2003.

The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards is a nonprofit consortium that works on the development, convergence, and adoption of open standards for cybersecurity, blockchain, Internet of things (IoT), emergency management, cloud computing, legal data exchange, energy, content technologies, and other areas.

REgular LAnguage description for XML (RELAX) is a specification for describing XML-based languages. A description written in RELAX is called a RELAX grammar.

In computing, RELAX NG is a schema language for XML—a RELAX NG schema specifies a pattern for the structure and content of an XML document. A RELAX NG schema is itself an XML document but RELAX NG also offers a popular compact, non-XML syntax. Compared to other XML schema languages RELAX NG is considered relatively simple.

Document Schema Definition Languages (DSDL) is a framework within which multiple validation tasks of different types can be applied to an XML document in order to achieve more complete validation results than just the application of a single technology.

The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), also known as OpenDocument, is an open file format for word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations and graphics and using ZIP-compressed XML files. It was developed with the aim of providing an open, XML-based file format specification for office applications.

HyTime is a markup language that is an application of SGML. HyTime defines a set of hypertext-oriented element types that, in effect, supplement SGML and allow SGML document authors to build hypertext and multimedia presentations in a standardized way.

Office Open XML is a zipped, XML-based file format developed by Microsoft for representing spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. Ecma International standardized the initial version as ECMA-376. ISO and IEC standardized later versions as ISO/IEC 29500.

The Open Document Format for Office Applications, commonly known as OpenDocument, was based on OpenOffice.org XML, as used in OpenOffice.org 1, and was standardised by the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) consortium.

ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34, Document description and processing languages is a subcommittee of the ISO/IEC JTC 1 joint technical committee, which is a collaborative effort of both the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission, which develops and facilitates standards within the field of document description and processing languages. The international secretariat of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 34 is the Japanese Industrial Standards Committee (JISC) located in Japan.

The DocBook XSL stylesheets are a set of XSLT stylesheets for the XML-based DocBook language.

The Office Open XML file formats, also known as OOXML, were standardised between December 2006 and November 2008, first by the Ecma International consortium, and subsequently, after a contentious standardization process, by the ISO/IEC's Joint Technical Committee 1.

A Formal Public Identifier (FPI) is a short piece of text with a particular structure that may be used to uniquely identify a product, specification or document. FPIs were introduced as part of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), and serve particular purposes in formats historically derived from SGML. Some of their most common uses are as part of document type declarations (DOCTYPEs) and document type definitions (DTDs) in SGML, XML and historically HTML, but they are also used in the vCard and iCalendar file formats to identify the software product which generated the file.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Ossenbruggen, Jacco van; Lynda Hardman; Lloyd Rutledge; Anton Eliens. "Style Sheet Languages for Hypertext" (PDF). ACM SIGWEB Newsletter, Volume 6, Issue 3, pp 16–20. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI). Archived (PDF) from the original on 2014-05-25.
  2. ↑ ISO (5 March 2008). "JTC 1/SC 34 - Document description and processing languages". ISO. Retrieved 2009-12-25.
  3. ↑ ISO JTC1/SC34. "JTC 1/SC 34 - Document Description and Processing Languages". Archived from the original on 2014-05-06. Retrieved 2009-12-25.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  4. ↑ Grønmo, Geir Ove (March 1997). "DSSSL.KLD - KEDIT Language Definition for DSSSL Specifications". XML Coverpages. OASIS . Retrieved 2015-02-27.
  5. ↑ Opera Software. "DSSSL Lite Specification preliminary draft" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-04-28. Retrieved 2016-03-08.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.