Re: [xsl] Perfomance: 'conditional instruction' vs. 'multi template'

[Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 03/11/2012 18:42, Daniel Sullivan wrote:
> But templates in the importing stylesheet that match have absolute priority  over those in the imported stylesheet, so a declarative stylesheet that imports another stylesheet would have the same effect whether the imported stylesheet was declarative or imperative, wouldn't it?
The point is that if you split your code into smaller templates, then 
you can override smaller parts of your code. It's the same as in OO 
programming - big monolithic methods can only be overridden in-toto, you 
can't change parts of their behaviour selectively.

Incidentally, the terms "declarative" and "imperative" for describing 
this distinction are not really very appropriate. Arguably everything in 
XSLT is declarative. It's just that some constructs look more imperative 
than others - especially those like choose and apply-templates and 
format-number that are expressed using imperative English verbs.

Michael Kay
Saxonica