RE: Data in Stylesheets [was: Comments affect Performance?]

[Kay Michael <Michael.Kay@xxxxxxx>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Warren Hedley [mailto:w.hedley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: 27 September 2000 14:45
> To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Data in Stylesheets [was: Comments affect Performance?]
> 
> 
> Kay Michael wrote:
> > 
> > When the stylesheet is accessed as a source document (using 
> document(""))
> > the same rules for whitespace and comments apply as for any 
> other source
> > document. In Saxon, this means the stylesheet is re-parsed 
> and a separate
> > tree is built.
> 
> That's interesting. Does that mean that storing information 
> in the stylesheet
> document, a common suggestion for solving search and replace 
> problems, is
> probably not very efficient, because the processor is 
> actually re-loading the stylesheet?
> 
It means, with Saxon, that it's no more efficient than storing the data in a
separate file. Unless of course there is some OS or web server or browser
caching that makes it more efficient to read the same file twice than to
read two separate files.

XSLT processors that are DOM-based, like MSXML3, probably use a different
strategy (I'm guessing here) in which the whitespace and comments are not
actually removed from the tree but simply masked from the XSLT processor.
With these processors, the overhead of building two separate trees is
presumably avoided.

Mike Kay 


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