RE: [xsl] XSLT 1.0 support in browsers, as of June 2008

["Michael Kay" <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Also, inreality how expensive is the ancestor axis?
> 
> Saxon's TinyTree is interesting in that only the last sibling 
> contains the parent pointer, so to get the parent/ancestor 
> the siblings are traversed first to find the parent (I think 
> anyway) which suggests it could be expensive.

That was true at one time. These days a pointer to the parent is inserted
once every 20 children or so, so you avoid the pathological case. (In any
case this only tended to arise with data-oriented XML; with documents the
number of children per parent is rarely very large.)

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/