> Out of curiosity, wouldn't the Perl external-document 
> approach be inaccurate due to the way XSLT function results 
> are (supposed to be) evaluated and stored? That is, if you had this:
> 
<snip/>
> 
> Wouldn't that output the same result six times because 
> (theoretically) the XSLT processor should only have to 
> retrieve the contents of document('/cgi-bin/rand.pl?6') once, 
> and just use the retrieved content for each successive call? 
> It is the same URI, after all, but I'm not sure just how the 
> gears of the big XSLT processors work in this situation.
> 
> 

Yes, the XSLT specification guarantees that if you call doc() (or
document()) twice with the same URI, you get the same identical document
back both times.

Regards,

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