Re: Associating DSSSL style sheets with documents

Toby Speight (tms@ansa.co.uk)
06 Mar 1997 10:59:48 +0000

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Jon> Jon Bosak <URL:mailto:bosak@atlantic-83.Eng.Sun.COM>

>>>>> In article <199703060017.QAA00505@boethius.eng.sun.com>, Jon
>>>>> wrote:

Jon> One possible method suggested by James Clark (thank you, James)
Jon> is to adopt the convention used by Jade in the absence of the -d
Jon> option: replace the extension of the document entity's URL or
Jon> file name with .dsl and fetch that. Thus, if a browser fetches

Jon> http://docs.sun.com/foo/bar.html

Jon> then it should also look for

Jon> http://docs.sun.com/foo/bar.dsl

Jon> and apply it to bar.html if found.

I'll not comment on the merits/demerits of this (many have already
done so), but if the protocol is HTTP, it may be worth attempting to
get the same document with a different "Accept" header[*]. This would
work well with servers like the one I run, where URLs don't
necessarily include the ".html" or whatever and the server chooses the
best Content-Type.

[*] I'm not sure how easy it is to specify Accept in java.net.URL,
though.

A next level of fallback would be to look for .../foo/index.dsl,
perhaps? I can see the heuristics for this getting quite long and
complicated - my favoured technique is to use PIs aimed at the
renderer, otherwise use a particular element (like LINK in HTML). The
nice thing about this is that you can specify several style documents,
and have the application choose (it helps if we have some consensus on
how to choose):

<?XML-STYLE sheet="style1.dsssl" type="text/dsssl" class="paper-a4">
<?XML-STYLE sheet="style2.dsssl" type="text/dsssl"
class="screen-color-8bit">


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