DSSSL

• The DSSSL standard is available for download, as front matter/TOC (pdf/ps) and body (pdf/ps). James Clark has also made available a version in HTML.

  There is a Technical Corrigendum, WG8 N1883, for the DSSSL standard.

  Important clauses of the standard are

  • 8. Expression Language: 8.6. Core Expression Language
  • 10. SDQL: 10.2.4. Core Query Language
  • 12.4. Flow Object Tree Construction
• The DSSSL Online subset of full DSSSL.
• The DSSSL Digest lists `all the procedures and top-level expressions from the electronic version of the DSSSL standard document. Each prototype is followed by the first paragraph of its definition in the standard.' Also downloadable.
• The SGML pages' DSSSL page
• DSSSLHELP: HTML version of the DSSSL specification.
• DSSSL documentation project. This is still growing, but there's already a fair amount of useful stuff, including the outline of a DSSSL Handbook (little more than that as yet, but it appears to be growing, and looks as if it will be useful when it's more nearly complete), and a growing cookbook.
• JadeTeX links: TeXFOTBuilder at jclark.com, at Oasis, at TUG.
• James Clark's DSSSL and Jade pages.
• Jon Bosak's collection of DSSSL materials
• Norm Walsh's SGML pages cover DSSSL
• There's some movement on open-source development of Jade. `Open Jade' has a CVS repository, and Didier Martin has assembled an Open Jade home page.
• Dave Megginson's Node Properties in Jade, and the overview.
• Grove guide (property sets again)
• Others: DSSSL-online; a `tiny tutorial' on how to get the sp/jade/jadetex suite working in a basic way' DSSSL Syntax Summary Index (rather dense, but probably ultimately useful).
• The DSSSList mailing list is extremely valuable.
• The OpenMath Consortium is an Esprit project: Accessing and Using Mathematical Information Electronically. It includes David Carlisle's DSSSL style sheet for MathML. See also MathML in XSLT.

Tutorial introductions (in order)

• Paul Prescod. Very clear (even if it sometimes has overtones of Play School about it `now let's try to...'); also pretty compact, going from assuming nothing to non-trivial programming in a fairly short time.
• Daniel M. Germán. More advanced, but also more fragmented.
• An avowedly simple set of tutorials on DSSSL, XSL, and co.
• A tutorial on DSSSL's Core Expression Language is really more of a quick reference than a tutorial, but is useful for that. At the same place, the DSSSL cookbook is just that - a collection of snatches of code to do useful things.
• These concentrate (rationally) on producing print documents. Jade has extensions which allow it to produce SGML (see Jade's `Using Jade for SGML transformations'. Examples: a simple example of the infrastructure required
• For more complicated examples of DSSSL stylesheets, see the DocBook to HTML stylesheets by Mark Burton and Norm Walsh. The latter includes an interesting discussion of the semantics of DocBook's OLink element (inter-document cross-referencing). Also take a look at the DSSSL spec Eliot Kimber wrote for converting the HyTime spec to HTML.
• DSSSL is based on the language Scheme, for which the Scheme reference manual can act as a high-speed tutorial. See also Scheme at Yahoo
• After that, you're going to have to read the standard (which is pretty clearly written, in fact).

Possibly of interest is Resource Library - An Annotatable DSSSL Stylesheet Environment, for doing literate DSSSL programming. For other discussions of literate programming, see remarks by Kimber and Sperberg-McQueen.

Norman Created: 1 January 2001 Last modified: 9 January 2002