RE: applying templates to all but ...

> I'm not sure how you did your timing, but when doing a 
> one-off transform
> with saxon often the bulk of the elapsed time is spent starting up the
> JVM.

There's an undocumented command-line option -3 that causes the same
transformation to be done three times; the timing for the third one is
reasonably typical of what you can expect if you were running in a compiled
application rather than from the shell.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/