The TEIViewer is a browser-based application built on a modification of the XHTML branch of the Text Encoding Initiative XSL stylesheet family and the jQuery JavaScript Library.
A better approach is to parse the XSLT stylesheet into memory once, compile it to machine-format, and then preserve that machine representation in memory for repeated use. This is called stylesheet compilation and is no different in concept than the compilation of any programming language.
TEI Boilerplate is a lightweight solution for publishing styled TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) P5 content directly in modern browsers. With TEI Boilerplate, TEI XML files can be served directly to the web without server-side processing or translation to HTML. Our TEI Boilerplate Demo illustrates many TEI features rendered by TEI Boilerplate.