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

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 08:07 PM 04/11/00 -0500, Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com wrote:

>I've now looked back at the great DOM+CSS vs XSLT debate of June 1999, and noted Stephen Deach's observation that PostScript is a procedural language and PDF is a declarative language <http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list/archive/msg03253.html>http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list/archive/msg03253.html, so the world already has a use case to draw on here. He goes on to say that "the biggest gain in switching  to a declarative language is in predictability and reliability of the authored  input (it can be validated) and in the ease of developing correct  implementations of the formatter."

Reaching a bit high.  PDF is binary and opaque and compared to 
PostScript has many other disadvantages.  It has the huge advantage
that something that happens on page 4 can't possibly affect what
happens on page 117, so you can print it in parallel with immensely
more efficiency.  That's the reason the publishing industry loves
it.  Also it's a lot more compact than PostScript but that's a 
lesser issue. -Tim