performace through better xml?

[chris markiewicz <cm...@commnav.com>]

hello.

if you have a handful of related xml elements, does it improve performance
if they are aggregated inside another element (other than root)?  for
example, i have a set of users <user> that are returned as a child of the
root element.  in xsl, i use

<xsl:apply-templates select="/sbh/user"/>

(where sbh is the root).  would it improve performance if i instead grouped
the users inside a userlist node?  does the xslt processor scan from the top
each time looking for user elements?  to put it in coding terms, would it be
faster to use:

<xsl:apply-templates select="/sbh/userlist"/> (there would only be 1 of
these)

<xsl:template match="userlist">
  <xsl:apply-templates select="user"/>
</xsl:template>

thanks
chris