A theoretical foundation of the DSSSL location model

In the location model of Document Style Semantics and Specification Language (DSSSL), one can use tree patterns to locate nodes in logical structures of documents. A tree pattern consists of conditions on nodes and those on their hierarchical relationships. As a first step towards efficient implementations, this paper shows a theoretical foundation of the location model. Tree patterns are first expressed by sentences of branching-time temporal logic. These sentences are then converted to well-formed attribute grammars. Thus, the library of attribute grammar evaluation techniques can be used to implement the location model. It is our belief that this observation is significant for future implementors of DSSSL. Furthermore, the converted attribute grammars can be evaluated by traversing logical structures several times. The number of required traversals can be found by examining the original sentences.