DSSSL utilities

These currently only contain the BigDieSeL tool, which is meant to play with SGML/XML document groves, and maybe become one day a full-fledged DSSSL processor using compiled stylesheets.

BigDieSeL

There is some code, although not much. Modules that currently exist are:

A hand-crafted lexer for SGML/XML-like document, which for now only extracts very minimal information from documents with many many constraints on their structure.
A hand-crafted parser / grove builder, based on above lexer. It does know yet about much more than SGML/XML elements.
A grapher that takes groves built by the parser and outputs graph information for the VCG tool, which will take care of the layout. Yes, there are screenshots :).

Get it

Since it's very much a work-in-progress thing for now, it's only available through anonymous CVS (using empty password):

cvs -d:pserver:anoncvs@subversions.gnu.org:/cvsroot/dsssl-utils login
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anoncvs@subversions.gnu.org:/cvsroot/dsssl-utils co bigdiesel

Required software

You'll need these software packages to test BigDieSeL:

The Bigloo scheme compiler, to build from source

The VCG grapher, to display grove graphs

All of them are available as Debian packages, in Debian 3.0 and later: apt-get install bigloo vcg

Future plans

Improve the grapher
Write a real parser (partly done)
Implement basic grove-querying functions from DSSSL
Add lazy construction of the grove
Add support for (a reasonable part of) the whole base SGML property set
Add the core DSSSL expression language
Add the DSSSL query language
Add support for grove plans
When that will be done, we'll see :)

Resources

Useful links

The DSSSL standard is available as zipped html, or pdf (front matter, including ToC separated from body), or sgml source and other formats.
The DSSSL cover pages.

Yann Dirson

Last modified: Mon Jul 29 17:12:48 CEST 2002