To emphasize what others have said, if your stylesheet has 
a significant performance problem then the difference between these two 
constructs is not going to make any useful contribution to solving 
it.
 
I do find, however, when I tackle a problem like this 
I like to start by tinkering away at the readability problems first, because 
after a few iterations of this the actual performance issue becomes much easier 
to spot.
 
As regards performance, I find the most important thing is 
to establish early on is how the stylesheet performance is affected by source 
document size. This can be done quite simply by creating source documents of a 
range of different sizes and plotting the elapsed time against size. If the 
results are non-linear, this tells you to look in the stylesheet for unnecessary 
document scans, often represented by absolute path expressions starting "/", or 
by use of the preceding and following axes.
 
Michael Kay


  
  
  From: Robert Hansson 
  [mailto:Robert.Hansson@o...] 
Sent: 06 July 2004 
  16:58
To: xml-dev@l...
Subject: [xml-dev] XSLT 
  Element Performence


  
  
  Hi!<o:p></o:p>
  <o:p> </o:p>
  I have been taking over a project 
  with thousands of lines of XSLT code that I need to change because of 
  performance and readability problems. About the performance issues I 
  <o:p></o:p>
  need someone to tell me which of 
  the following two examples is the best one for performance, what’s the 
  differences and what to think about.<o:p></o:p>
  <o:p> </o:p>
  Example 
  1:<o:p></o:p>
  <o:p> </o:p>
  <xsl:element 
  name="div"><xsl:attribute name="id"><xsl:value-of 
  select="@id"/></xsl:attribute></xsl:element><o:p></o:p>
  <o:p> </o:p>
  Example 
  2:<o:p></o:p>
  <o:p> </o:p>
  <div 
  id="{@id}"></div><o:p></o:p>
  <o:p> </o:p>
  <o:p> </o:p>
  Cheers,<o:p></o:p>
  <o:p> </o:p>
  Robert.<o:p></o:p>
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