Re: [xsl] Re: How to output open/close tags independently?

[Mike Brown <mike@xxxxxxxx>]

Edward L. Knoll wrote:
> For the "good" (XSLT-correct) approach:
>   real  2:41:32.6
>   user  2:31:57.0
>   sys         1.9
> 
> For the "bad" (d-o-e) approach:
>   real     1:38.4
>   user     1:31.8
>   sys         1.0
> 
> The "good" approach took hours; the "bad" approach took minutes.  For
> those that will care, the test environment was a Sun Solaris platform
> using the interim release of the Xalan C++ 1.4 XSLT processor.

I would expect some increase in processing time, but not 2 orders of
magnitude. If I were you, I would report to the xalan-dev list your findings,
the stylesheet you used, and an example of your data. You may have revealed
bug.

Either way, your conclusions about d-o-e are only as good as your commitment
to using that particular processor in that particular processing chain.

> I understand staying true to a paradigm up to a
> point, but sooner or later "the rubber has to hit the road". 

There was a good thread on this topic earlier this year. Wish I could find it.
Someone remarked on the short-sightedness of developers who consider success
to be putting in the least amount of effort to get something that "just
works", regardless of how difficult it will be to maintain, extend, debug,
make work on other platforms, or integrate into a previously unforeseen
processing chain.

Besides, if all you care about is speed and writing tags, why bother with
XSLT? Write a SAX content handler in your whatever language your favorite
parser supports. Siphon off the data you need (unless your transformation is
so simple that you can manipulate data on the fly), mess with it after the
parse, and paste it together with a bunch of other strings that give you
whatever tags you want. 

Better yet, just use Perl and regular expressions. Heck, why bother using XML
at all? Use EDI or ASN.1 or CSV or that .ini file format.

My point is, don't complain when people on an XSL list dispense advice in
terms of the most XSL-friendly approach to a problem, rather than in terms of
a Perl-friendly approach that may only work some of the time. If you make a
commitment to using a particular language, you have to live with its
paradigms, warts and all.


Mike

-- 
  Mike J. Brown   |  http://skew.org/~mike/resume/
  Denver, CO, USA |  http://skew.org/xml/

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