Glossary

attribute

One attributte makes available extra information regarding the element on which it appears. The attributes always appear as a name-value pair on the initialization pointers. Example of an attribute is id="identification", which gives to the attribute id the value identification.

Document Type Definition (DTD)

Group of statements that define element names and their attributes specifying the rules for combinations and sequences. It's the DTD that define which elements can or cannot be inserted in the context on which the cursor is in.

DSSSL

DSSSL stands for Document Style Semantics and Specification Language. It's an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 10179:1996). The DSSSL standard is internationally used as a language for documents stylesheets pages for SGML.

element

The elements define the hierarchical structure of a document. The majority of elements have opening and closing pointers. Among these pointers, pieces of text or even the whole document being written can be found. There are empty elements which contains only opening pointers without any content.

entity

Entity is a name designated for some part of data so that it can be referenced by a name. These designations are made by a statement and the stored data might hold from simple characters to chapters or set of statements of a DTD. There are parameter entities generic, external, internal and of data on theSGML.

external entity

An external entity points to an external document. External entities are used to include texts on certain locations of a SGML document. Suggestions for its use includes sample screens, legal notes and chapters.

generic entities

An entity referenced by a name which starts with "&" and ends with semicolon is a generic entity. Most of the time these type of entities are used on the document and not on the DTD. There are two types of entities: external and internal which refers either to special characters or to text objects such as repeated sentences, names or chapters.

internal entity

An internal entity refers to part of the text and is often used as a schortcut for portions of a text frequently repeated.

paremeter entity

An entity often used on the DTD. The entity's name starts with a percent sign (%) and it ends with a semicolon.

float

Objects such as side bars, pictures, tables and charts are called floats when they don't have a fixed placement on the text. For a printed text, the chart can appear either at the top or at the bottom of the page. It can also be placed on the next page if that's too large.

processing instruction

A processing instruction is a command passed to the document formatting tool. It starts with "<?". A sample of instruction is used on this document for the generated file's choice when the file is converted to HTML: <?dbhtml filename="file.html">

SGML

Standard Generalized Markup Language. It's also an international standard (ISO8879) which specifies rules for the creation of electronic documents in markup systems regardless the work platform used.

tag

An SGML element bounded by the marks "<" and ">". Tags are used to mark the semantic or the structure of a document. A sample is the tag <title> to mark the beginning of a title.

XML

eXtensible Markup Language. A subproduct of SGML created specifically for Internet use.

XSL

XML Style Language. XSL is to a XML document what a DSSSL style is for a SGML document. In fact, the style is a document XML.