RE: Omnimark vs. XSL (Saxon) Challenge

> The main problem is the use of colspan and rowspan, which makes it 
> hard for any cell to know to which column it belongs. One has to 
> render the table from start to finish to learn that for each cell.

I put forward a solution to a similar problem a while back:

http://www.biglist.com/lists/xsl-list/archives/200402/msg00447.html

This basically 'normalises' a table to remove the rowspans and colspans.
The technique is to process the table horizontally to remove the
colspans and the vertically to remove the rowspans.

For your problem, I would normalise the table into a variable, copying
through any width values that are for a single cell (that is, a width
value on an <entry> with no colspan specified).  You should then have at
least one definite width value per column.

The processing complexity should be proportional to your input, rather
than exponential (which Im guessing your solution is) so you should
notice a dramatic performance improvement.

Cheers
andrew 

 XSL-List info and archive:  http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list