transforming the least possible xml

Hi,

I have a proprietary, memory resident work app, that
I'll omit the inner details on for brevity.

But basically for a client request, it obtains a small
XML file, modifies all the <link> elements to include
a string like CLIENT_ID in it(a client provided
parameter is passed to the xslt processor which will
replace CLIENT_ID). 

I then apply my stylesheet to the updated XML file,
and return the resulting HTML output to the client.

To save time, I cache the intermediate XML where all
the <link> elements were modified to include
CLIENT_ID, so at least that doesn't have to be done
more than once.

So for subsequent requests the only thing that is
actually changing is CLIENT_ID. I'd like to figure out
way to effectively only parse/process that part of the
sheet.

I tried converting the output to XHTML, and then
applying a new style sheet with one template to match
<link>blah CLIENT_ID blah</link>, but it takes longer
;/ because the resulting XHTML file is quite nasty
(others control the HTML look), it takes longer to
parse.

I feel like there's a solution here escaping
me...using includes....stylesheet to create stylesheet
but I can't figure out an intelligent way to do it..

I'm using libxml libxslt based tools, and I have no
choice but to stick with those really.

thank you for any suggestions!

Stephen

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