XSLT does not mandate the implementation, but pratically XSLT processors build the whole tree in memory. In any case, if you want to be able to use arbitrary XPath expressions on a document, you pretty much need to have it all in memory.

It would be theoretically possible to build really smart XSLT engines that would look at the code and do some clever optimization to only build parts of the tree, but I am not aware of any one that actually does this.

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Re: Why XSLT and not just Perl? by mirod
in thread Why XSLT and not just Perl? by blahblah

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