THE ABCS OF DSSSL

DSSSL, the Document Style Semantics and Specification Language, is ISO /IEC 10179, an International Standard for the formatting and other pro cessing of SGML documents, DSSSL was completed in January 1996 after 8 years of development, From its inception, DSSSL was conceived as a co mpanion standard to SGML, where SGML is a language for standardizing t he way we represent document structures without regard to its form or presentation, It is possible to use SGML markup to represent formattin g information, but this is discouraged, since doing so makes a documen t more difficult to reuse and reprocess, Reuse is generally a signific ant requirement for SGML data so it is not a good idea to ''pollute'' your document with presentational markup, Yet formatting of some natur e is still desirable, and sometimes critical, for all documents, and i n some cases users want to interchange this formatting information (in formally known in the industry as style sheets) in a standardized, non -proprietary format. DSSSL is key to enabling this interchange.