Document Style Semantics and Specification Language

Document Style Semantics and Specifications Language (DSSSL) is a language for specifying stylesheets for SGML documents. It uses the Scheme programming language. It is specified by the standard ISO/IEC 10179:1996.

SGML contains information in a human-readable but not very pretty format. A "stylesheet" is used to present the information stored in SGML in a more pleasing or accessible way. DSSSL can convert to a wide range of formats including RTF, HTML and LaTeX.

Although compatible with any SGML, DSSSL is most often used with DocBook.

In parallel with the move from SGML to XML, people are using XSL instead. However, many of the concepts used in XSL originated with DSSSL.

External links

• James Clark's DSSSL page: http://www.jclark.com/dsssl/
• The final text of the DSSSL standard: ftp://ftp.ornl.gov/pub/sgml/WG8/DSSSL/ (See README file in there for copyright notice.)