> > It's taking a long time because it's fetching the DTD from a remote 
> > HTTP site. Nothing to do with the XSLT code at all
> 
> Shouldn't that only happen when you use saxon -v option? 

No, it's a common mistake to think processors only fetch the DTD if
validating. They have to fetch it to discover entity references and
attribute types (e.g. IDs).

> Or, put differently, is it possible to tell the processor to skip 
> foreign resources? 

The usual technique is to use OASIS catalogs.

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