The main conclusion that I draw from this is that XSLT, designed for use
primarily in support of a stylesheet, is inappropriate for batch processing
of large data tables.  This surprises me very little.  Child-to-parent
communication would certainly improve performance for the task you
describe, but it would blow incremental rendering in browsers and editors
all to hell.

That doesn't mean I'm unsympathetic, and I think there's certainly room for
something like what you describe.  Perhaps XQL will be that something;
perhaps a set of XSLT extensions for large dataset processing will emerge.
But don't try to sharpen my hammer because you want to drill holes with it.
(-:

-Chris



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