[mod_python] XSLT versus 'traditional' templating

(combined responses, this thread is probably getting too offtopic...)

Scott Sanders wrote:
Nic Ferrier wrote:
[I believe you both told me it's possible to stream data through an XSLT 
processor; please correct me if this is not what you meant!]

My basic problem here is that there are trivial XSLT fragments that may 
not be determinable until the entire source document has been read. 
Consider <xsl:if test="/foo/bar">There is a bar element</xsl:if>.  In 
this example, a source document may have no bar elements at all, or it 
may have a bar element as the very last element before closing the root 
foo element.  An XSLT processor cannot distinguish these cases until the 
root element has been closed.

If the bar element appeared earlier in the document, a sufficiently 
clever XSLT processor could continue processing as soon as that element 
was encountered, but this falls down when you consider:

<xsl:for-each select="/foo/bar">Another bar found</xsl:for-each>

In this case, processing must be halted until the root element has been 
closed, since another bar element may be encountered at any time.  Once 
again, a clever processor could continue processing, storing tree 
fragments for later use, but it could not output any further elements 
until it was satisfied that the xsl:for-each had completed.

So, I can see how a sufficiently clever XSLT processor could stream 
output where possible, but this requires the stylesheet author to 
carefully avoid any construct that would cause output to block.  Most 
notably, any XPath expression used to control transformation that cannot 
be sufficiently evaluated until the document is fully parsed must be 
avoided, and for any non-trivial use of XSLT, this is, to say the least, 
a hard task.

If I'm missing something here, please fill me in, because I am in the 
process of recommending an XML/XSLT approach to web development here at 
work, and I'd love to strike out the cost to perceived response times 
associated with a document transformation.

-- 
bje