Worked on the XML-to-HTML conversion scripts some more on the train this morning. Cross-references are working pretty well now, but thanks to (yet another) XLST limitation, processing the stylesheet is much slower than it ought to be. If I could only do

< xsl:key select="document('INDEX.XML')//DEFINITION"
use="@name"/>

(where INDEX.XML is generated on a separate preprocessing pass) then I could use the key() function to look up cross-references. Since this isn't allowed, it's necessary to do a linear scan through the entire index document for each hyperlink.

XSLT is a really nice language for the most part, but I keep running into (apparently arbitrary) limitations like this. I'd really like to be able to define functions from node-sets to node-sets. xsl:template can emulate node set functions, but can only return strings or result-tree-fragments. Compositionality is lacking...