Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!think.com!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!ira.uka.de!fauern!opal!kraftbus!cabo From: cabo@cs.tu-berlin.de (Carsten Bormann) Newsgroups: comp.text.sgml Subject: Re: Why doesn't DSSSL use the SGML LINK feature? Message-ID: Date: 27 Jun 91 15:26:41 GMT References: Sender: cabo@opal.cs.tu-berlin.de Organization: Technical University of Berlin Lines: 36 In-reply-to: jjc@jclark.UUCP's message of 27 Jun 91 09:52:35 GMT In article jjc@jclark.UUCP (James Clark) writes: I just started reading ISO/IEC DIS 10179, Document Style Semantics and Specification Language, and I was surprised to find that it made no use of the SGML LINK feature. The CD (DP) version of DSSSL did make use of LINK to bind a DSSSL specification to an SGML source document. The DIS version specifies in clause 2.2 "The binding of a DSSSL specification to an SGML source document instance is outside the scope of this international standard". While I did not take part in that decision, I could imagine that requiring support for a rather obscure% SGML feature such as LINK for the sole purpose of binding a style to a document was considered to be overkill (you could still use LINK for this purpose in the DIS version if you wanted). Now the next question is, "why doesn't DSSSL make use of LINK as a representation of association specifications?" (there actually was some pressure to use LINK as the basis for DSSSL in this way). The answer is that (a) LINK is rarely implemented in today's SGML products, and (b) LINK was not considered to be as powerful and easy to use as the location model (then called "FQGI") idea that underlies DSSSL. Consequently, DSSSL implementers would have had to newly implement an SGML feature that would not have been quite adequate to the problem anyway. A question whose answer would interest me is: who or what did make you aware of DSSSL, and how do you intend to use it? Gruesse, Carsten ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- % obscure in the sense of "rarely implemented" and thus not readily applicable to problems at hand.