XSL: The Background

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Let me provide a little history lesson. You can skip this if you just want to get straight to the code, but you might find the evolution of XSL interesting.

As you learned in earlier chapters, in 1986, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) adopted the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). Like XML, SGML allows implementers to express the structure—but not the formatting—of their information. Soon after the adoption of SGML, some members of the SGML committee formed a new committee to work on a standard language for expressing the formatting characteristics of an SGML document. This language was called the Document Style Semantics and Specification Language (DSSSL). DSSSL took 10 years to complete because of the difficulty of designing a single syntax to express all formatting information for all documents and all devices.

The DSSSL spec was finally adopted as an ISO standard in 1996. Unfortunately for DSSSL, that was about the time XML was being developed, and potential DSSSL implementers took a wait-and-see attitude toward the DSSSL spec. To this day, I don't know of a single serious implementation of DSSSL.

In 1998, some members from the DSSSL committee formed a working group under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to create a standard for rendering XML documents (the way DSSSL was supposed to create a standard for SGML documents). Because this group had already worked for 10 years to understand how documents could be rendered, members got off to a quick start and ultimately developed XSL.



XML and SOAP Programming for BizTalk Servers
XML and SOAP Programming for BizTalk(TM) Servers (DV-MPS Programming)
ISBN: 0735611262
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2000
Pages: 150

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