We don't currently have a mechanism for prefiltering the DOM. You could
write such a filter in XSLT, of course, though that might not be as
efficient as a filter coded at a lower level. Theoretically one could adopt
the DOM-to-DTM conversion to run from a TreeWalker or NodeIterator, though
that isn't quite as trivial as it might seem due to the ways we try to
avoid recopying data (at least in interpretive Xylem; I think XSLTC is
still less optimized in that regard and may be a bit easier to adapt to
pre-filtering for that reason.)
In other words: Interesting idea waiting for someone who has the time to
invest in making it work properly and donating it to the Xalan project.
______________________________________
Joe Kesselman, IBM Next-Generation Web Technologies: XML, XSL and more.
"The world changed profoundly and unpredictably the day Tim Berners Lee
got bitten by a radioactive spider." -- Rafe Culpin, in r.m.filk
