xml-dev - Re: Procedural vs Declarative XML transformation approaches

[Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org>]

On Sat, 4 Nov 2000 Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com wrote:

> I don't want to open too big a can of worms, but I'd appreciate any pointers
> to background information that might help me understand the pros and cons,
> appropriate use cases, etc. for the alternative approaches to transforming
> XML (either to a display format or another XML format).  There exist
> non-procedural languages such as XSLT to do this by "declaring" what is to
> be done, and there exist  procedural approaches -- such as  DOM+Javascript,
> OmniMark, XMLPerl, PHP (?), and perhaps XSLScript -- that  let you write a
> script to just *do* what needs to be done.
> 
> I'm not interested in a rehash of what's right and wrong with XSLT itself,
> but a more abstract discussion of when and why one would take one approach
> or the other.

I tried to cover a little bit of this in both my xml.com article on
XPathScript [1], and my AxKit talk at ApacheCon. Basically, procedural
code is great for data oriented XML structures, but almost useless for XML
mixed content. For mixed content you really need declarative code. I hope
that XPathScript provides a nice feeling for those who need or want both
(and of course those who like Perl!).

[1] http://www.xml.com/pub/2000/07/05/xpathscript/index.html

-- 
<Matt/>

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