Another feature request

[sh...@us.ibm.com]

This is another feature request, though in this case I suspect it's more
involved. [By the way, I'm not trying to get others to do the work for me.
I'ld happily volunteer to do both of these, but it's probable that other
people know the code well enough to do these in a few minutes, while I
would have to spin up.]

Several notes have identified performance issues in xalan; there is an
outstanding bug report in this area.

One simple thing that could be done is to improve xalan's ability to reuse
the work.  At the moment, if I have a bunch of XML documents to process
with the same style sheet, there is no way to amortize the work of parsing
and internalizing the style sheet, because there is no way on the command
line to process more than one XML document at a time.

A possible way to change this is to revise the command line interface to
allow:

     xalan -MEDIA 'html' -OEXT 'html' foo.xml bar.xml bletch.xml

which would generate foo.html, bar.html, and bletch.html using the
stylesheet discovered by examining the xml-stylesheet processing
instructions in the xml documents that match the media type.  Internally,
xalan could build an association list between the stylesheet URI and the
resulting internal structure, allowing the stylesheet compilation effort to
be reused where appropriate.

Note that this interface can be supported even if internal reuse of the
stylesheet is not yet possible; for the moment one can simply always
rebuild the stylesheet.

Jonathan S. Shapiro, Ph. D.
Research Staff Member
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
Email: shapj@us.ibm.com
Phone: +1 914 784 7085  (Tieline: 863)
Fax: +1 914 784 6576