Re: [xml-dev] Why does XML call them "attributes" and not name-valuepair

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

> 
> For point of argument, let's say that an attribute that is an ID or Key will likely be indexed (xsl:key or some hash table or btree or list or whatever) by any process complex enough that we really care about memory usage (given that a process may be short on memory because we need expedition.)
> 

You're obviously right: all performance measurements suffer from the problem that data for one workload doesn't necessarily extrapolate to another.

Personally I would expect that for most documents, indexes aren't going to make a big difference (unless you're doing full text indexing), but I can't quantify "most", so that's a fairly meaningless statement.

Michael Kay
Saxonica