Re: create multiple documents

Jeni Tennison writes:
 > I think the main reason you might want to create multiple output
 > documents is for efficiency, just in terms of parsing inputs,
 > 'compiling' the stylesheet and constructing portions that are repeated
 > on several pages.

You can achieve the right effect in several ways. One way is store
several output files, as you say, but you can think of that as
repeated calls to transform the input document in different
ways. Either the document is static, in which case it does not matter
either way; or else its dynamic, in which case you always start from
scratch anyway.

I have a document which clocks in at over 1000 pages of densely
printed A4. Converting it to HTML takes several minutes, and I use
multiple output files. But I could equally well run several different
transforms by changing parameters to a cached stylesheet

 > But mainly then I'd prefer to avoid having to code something in Java
 > to manage it all efficiently, and rather have the XSLT processor take
 > care of all that.
well, there is that, yes :-}

 > illusion. (Of course I'm only talking about server-side
 > transformations here, and actually mainly talking about batch
 > transformations.)

we probably don't disagree much. but I do still claim that people use
multiple output files too often. I was forced to confront this myself
when setting up our web server to do XML->HTML on the fly, and I went
with a "go back to main XML document and get another section" system,
(rather than static multiple files), and I was surprised to find it
all works very happily

sebastian


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