RE: XSLT with SAX, Reduced Instruction Set Optimization and Liter al Result Element Stylesheets.

[Jo...@lotus.com]

>Am I interpreting the semantics of "select" correctly? Without knowing the
>format of the input document, stream processing only possible for very few
>cases.

Select's value is an XSLT expression, which may be a node-set... so I think
the answer is "yes."

>What strucks me as quite strange is that the XSLT spec does not provide
for
>specifying an input schema

Not all documents have schemas; XSLT wants to be able to process
well-formed documents as well as fully-validated ones.

>or for providing a way to secify "select THE ONE
>AND ONLY ONE firstname in the person entity"

I think that can be expressed with "firstname[1]". Part of the answer to
streaming may be to ask that stylesheet authors make their intentions more
explicit.

In fact, specifying [1] when you know only one is expected might yield
performance improvements even in non-steaming implementations, if they're
clever enough to realize that this predicate will succeed only once.