Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] questions, questions

[Ali A. <ali...@au...>]

* Gregory Leblanc (gle...@cu...) wrote at 22:28 on 04/12/00:
> > * Bob Stayton (bo...@sc...) wrote at 16:38 on 04/12/00:
> > >
> > > I think the performance of XSL processing will improve
> > > within six to twelve months.  If I were setting up a server
> > > today, though, I would preprocess all my XML docs into HTML
> > > files to be served.  Cron jobs or time stamps would have to
> > > be used to keep the HTML current. This would be similar to
> > > man pages being nroffed into cat files to improve
> > > performance when Unix machines used to be slower.
> > 
> > Yeah, I asked Daniel Veillard about this. Note: Cocoon is in Java as far as I
> > know and we all know about Java performance on Linux (I'm hoping a C
> > implementation would show up so we can compare/benchmark it).
> > 
> > Daniel recommended for me to parse XML using DOM (until XSLT performance
> > improves).
> 
> 
> How does this get around the issues of XSLT being slow?  I'm probably
> being obtuse, but I just don't see the connection.

Well, I was thinking that gnome-db2html2 should use XSL Transformations once
libxml gets the support for it. But Daniel warned me that A) it could take a
while for support and B) is computationally complex (so may not be suited for
run-time processing).

So instead I should use DOM to parse the doucment. (right now we use SAX
libxml parser).
 
> > I wonder how the performance would be if soembody used a "stripped down"
> > version of Norm Walsh's XSL stylesheet (I assume he supports a huge subset of
> > tags (all of DocBook?) while the GNOME project only uses ~120 tags).
> 
> 
> I'd much rather have the full set of DocBook tags available, as the
> overhead of changing the stylesheets when Joe Author decides to use a
> different tag is pretty high.  Does the manner in which XSL stylesheets
> are written affect the speed of processing as much as it does for
> DSSSL?  (One of the GNOME hackers had a REALLY awful DSSSL sheet the
> other day, it took many minutes to run on an 18K file).

Well, since an XSL basically involes some "programming" - it does depend on
how you write the stylesheet. But I think also if you have an XSL with 100
tags and an XSL with 500 tags, the one with 100 tags would be faster (even if
its just by 0.01%)

>     Greg
> 
> 
> P.S.  Hmm, we're probably drifting from the topics that should be on
> sk-devel now...

Yes :) we have diverged quite a bit