RE: XPath "//", speed, and Saxon

> I'm not saying choose between them (unit tests are ideal for testing
> functions) just that for XSLT the "fashionable" way of 
> development shouldn't be unit tests and coverage tools, it 
> should be schema based.

Type checking, whether at compile time or at run time, can never be a
substitute for unit testing because it will never detect all errors. But

(a) it's capable of detecting many errors much more quickly than unit
testing will find them

(b) if your unit test coverage is imperfect, which sadly is often the case,
then it can help to increase the robustness of your code at relatively
modest cost compared with writing thousands of test cases.

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