Re: Preaching DSSSL (Re: using LOUT)

[Valeriy E. Ushakov]

On Wed, Aug 27, 1997 at 01:11:45PM -0400, Chris Herborth wrote:

> Previously, Valeriy E. Ushakov (address@hidden) writes:
>
> > PS: Now back to SGML/DSSSL.  There's free DSSSL style engine called
> > Jade <URL:http://www.jclark.com/jade/> by James Clark (author of groff
> > and nsgmls).  Currently it has RTF and TeX backends.
[...]
> Isn't there an HTML back-end, too?

Yes, I have listed only "formatter" backends.  BTW, HTML backend
(well, CSS in fact) looks a bit kludgy now when Jade provides SGML
backend as a substitute for STTL it doesn't implement.

> I would LOVE to see a Lout back-end for Jade.

I think many would do.

> Moving to DSSSL (an ISO standard) using Jade (free and portable) and
> Lout (free and portable) would really make me happy.

Now, when Jade is there, investing our efforts in it is the best thing
we could do to promote both systems.

> I'd do the work myself, but I don't know Lout or DSSSL at this point. 

Both are simple indeed.  Lout programming language may look strange at
first time, like, say, some pure functional language looks strange
after C.  But, as with any function langauge, once you're out of your
C mindset, you will discover the inherent power of the system (well
you'll discover some inherent weakness too).

DSSSL is very simple as well.  It really was a must for it, otherwise
we'd sunk in the monstrous and unwieldy API (look at Java for
miserable counterexapmple).  So DSSSL is really straight and I'd
advice everyone to read a note on DSSSL by Erik Naggum written in his
unique style at <URL:http://www.sil.org/sgml/dsssl-note-erik.html>.

I'd hack into this, but I'm *very* short in time, not enough to dig
into Jade (written in C++) internals.  There are ~3000 lines of TeX
backend, so Lout should be of the same complexity.  Perhaps some sort
of collaborative effort can be organized.

SY, Uwe
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