I’ve made a poster about some ideas to speed up XSLT evaluation (and get rid of some “misuse” of includes that is quite common apparently…) for use in websites like portal pages that are “filled” with data from different sources

  • and that may get updated independently.

The typical approach is to write own stylesheets for these parts and have a very simple include system compose the final website out of these blocks. But this means you don’t have a single stylesheet responsible for your site, which I don’t really like (well, in an ideal world you could give the template to some artist with almost no technical knowledge to do the design…)

Well, anyway, get the PDF of the poster. I’m not sure if I’m going to have it printed and put up - I’m not entirely happy, and I don’t know how much of this is already implemented in processors such as saxon… actually I’m more interested in whether this can improve speed much (think of having akamai run the xslt job for you, and you just supplying the xml data?) - and especially if this can help improving XML and XSLT acceptance (which IMHO seriously suffers by XSLT complexity - people just want to use what-you-see-is-what-you-broke).