RE: [xml-dev] DOM or SAX: Sense and Sensibility

[Benjamin Franz <snowhare@nihongo.org>]

On Wed, 14 Nov 2001, Michael Kay wrote:

> > Ah. I'm handling 10M documents in a typical transform in this
> > case. That makes a significant difference in where I spend my time.
> > The raw transform currently takes less than 1 second normally
>
> Would I be right in thinking that your transform is actually selecting
> a small part of the 10M input document, and extracting that part to
> the result document?

Yep. Specifically, I'm building web (HTML) pages. Typical output size in
the single to tens of K range.

> In that situation, where you run many of these extractions on the same
> in-memory document, the savings from not building the tree each time
> should certainly be substantial. The moral is that one should avoid
> phrases like "a typical transform"!

Probably. As with any general purpose tool, different people are going to
find dramatically different ways to use it.

> Incidentally, this use case demonstrates the high degree of overlap between
> the usage scenarios for XSLT and XQuery.

I'll need to think about that. I am still fighting to overcome my
prejudice against things that look like SQL. :)

-- 
Benjamin Franz

 "Code as if whoever maintains your code is a violent
  psychopath who knows where you live."
                    -- Nancy Lebovitz, the button lady