DSSSL is a language defined in ISO/IEC 10179:1996 [iso10179] as a means of specifying the formatting of SGML documents. It is the language, as implemented in the free DSSSL system Jade, used for almost all the processing of SGML documents in this Starlink SGML application. Since the language is likely to be of interest only to those with some knowledge of SGML, the rest of this section uses terminology not defined elsewhere in this document.
DSSSL source documents are SGML instances. When presented with a
source file, Jade does not process it immediately, but instead
extracts (rather nicely) an instance of the `DSSSL' architecture,
which must be declared in the DTD the document conforms to. The DTD
referred to by -//Starlink//DTD DSSSL Source Code 0.2//EN
declares such an architecture. It maps the programcode
codegroup element to the DSSSL style-specification
architectural form, codereference to
external-specification (with attribute name remapping) and
codebody to style-specification-body. This follows a
discussion of this technique in comp.text.sgml by Eliot
Kimber [kimber97a].
Also it defines the entity %direction.attr to be simply
`given', since arguments to DSSSL functions are only passed in.
See Appendix E for further discussion of the DSSSL code base.