Document Style Semantics and Specification Language

The Document Style Semantics and Specification Language (DSSSL) is an international standard developed to provide a stylesheets for SGML documents.

DSSSL consists of two parts, a tree transformation process that can be used to manipulate the tree structure of documents prior to presentation, and a formatting process that associates the elements in the source document with specific nodes in the target representation — the flow object tree. DSSSL specifications are device-independent pieces of information that can be interchanged between different platforms. The back-end formatters needed to generate the final form of the document (e.g. PostScript or Rich Text Format, or a presentation on a computer display) are not standardized by DSSSL.

Based on a subset of the Scheme programming language, it is specified by the standard ISO/IEC 10179:1996. It was developed by ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34 (ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1, Subcommittee 34 - Document description and processing languages).