RE: Many sets of eyes ...

Hi Jeni, thanks for your reply!

>There are a couple of stylistic things that I'd do slightly
>differently. First, I'd use simply * rather than ./* - paths are
>always evaluated relative to the context node, so having ./ at the
>start of a path doesn't change what the path returns, just adds a
>couple of "line noise" characters (as the XQuery guys would apparently

>call them ;) to the expression. I'd also personally use [1] rather
>than [position() = 1] but that's just to avoid typing.

How embarassing ;-) ... I knew that!! I was .. er.. just testing you ;-)


>More importantly from a performance point of view, I'd use xsl:choose
>where I could. You currently have:

(snip!)

>The two conditions are mutually exclusive - either one is true or the
>other is true. So there's no need to test both of them - instead you
>can just use an xsl:choose, with one xsl:when (and the test) and an
>xsl:otherwise to catch the case when the test isn't true:

There are other cases which aren't currently handled by the stlyesheet. 
For instance, Alice, Andrew, and Alicia are known to drop by from time 
to time ;-) However, the choose/otherwise structure is far better.

(snip!)

>So the above is equivalent to:
>
>  <xsl:apply-templates select="joe" />
>  <xsl:apply-templates select="ann" />
>
>Which is also equivalent to:
>
>  <xsl:apply-templates select="joe | ann" />
>
>Which is actually in this case equivalent to:
>
>  <xsl:apply-templates select="*" />

I've decided to go with your second suggestion -- in real life the wrap 
element potentially contains many different tags...

>Oh, and I suppose that you could derive the "Joe says" or "Ann says"
>algorithmically from the name of the child element, by translating the

>first letter to a capital, with:

(snip)

I used 'Joe says' and 'Ann says' for demonstration purposes. In reality,
this is header data, and cannot be derived algorighmically from the 
source data. Interesting idea though! And a nice opportunity to use the 
translate function!!

>The final thing is that rather than having a template matching the
>root element and iterating over the wrap elements with an
>xsl:for-each, I'd have a separate template for the wrap elements -
>that's just stylistic thing, really. Since you're stripping out
>whitespace, and not adding anything in the template for the root
>element, you can get rid of the template for the root element
>altogether.

Done.

(snip)

>I hope you find these comments helpful,

Extremely. Thanks for your help Jeni -- I've managed to shave 12.5% off 
the execution time as a result.

Regards,
Curtis.

-- 

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