My impression is that this bit you quote is theoretical right now,
that there aren't any XSLT engines that can perform that kind of analysis.
So performing that kind of work would end up having to be programmed at
the application level instead of being something the engine could just
figure out.
On page 987 of the book, "XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0" the author Michael Kay
discusses the advantages of functional programming. One of the main benefits,
he argues, is the ability to do incremental updates. Here is a paragraph that
really captured my interest:
------------------------------------------------------
We want to get away from static pages; if you're showing a map of traffic
congestion hotspots in your area, then when the data for a particular road
junction changes, you want the map updated in real time, and it should be
possible to do this without recalculating and redrawing the whole map. This
is possible if there's a direct relationship--a function--between what?s
shown at a particular place on the map display and a particular data item in
the underlying database. So if a program is decomposed into a set of smaller,
independent functions, each relating one piece of the output to one piece of
the input, then we have the potential to do this on-the-fly updating.
------------------------------------------------------
Wow! I want to do that. But how?
Suppose that I have an XML document and an XSLT transform. The XSLT transform
processes the entire document and outputs, say, an HTML document. Later, I
update one portion of of the XML document. How do I get the XSLT to operate
on just the updated portion? And how does the XSLT update just the relevant
portion of the HTML document?
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
James A. Robinson
jim(_dot_)robinson(_at_)stanford(_dot_)edu
Stanford University HighWire Press http://highwire.stanford.edu/
+1 650 7237294 (Work) +1 650 7259335 (Fax)
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