Incidentally, final result trees and RTFs are quite different. Final
result trees never actually exist in memory, nodes are serialized as
they are constructed.
And this actually imposes a problem; when RTFs and node sets are built
upon the same structure, it is often difficult to make adding nodes
to RTF as fast as serializing them. The result is that wrapping the
root template into a variable makes the stylesheet run several times
slower.
David Tolpin
XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list