According to Ilya Zakharevich:
Chip Salzenberg writes:
Consider: Why should it be that "<b>Hello</b> there!" no longer
matches the pattern /hello there/i ?
No, I get exactly the opposite conclusion:
a) the RE engine is broken wrt Unicode/whatever support.
b) HTML is broken since the markup data is *not* inband, but
"mixed" with the string data.
What do you mean by "inband"? I mean "occupying space in the string".
Suppose that utf8.pm knows about screen-width of chars (whatever this
means, for me width 0 and 1 is enough).
Have you ever used WordPerfect (a code-based editor) and also
FrameMaker or Microsoft Word (frame-based editors)?
You're proposing a code-based (WordPerfect-like) scheme -- where the
metadata are in-band but invisible by default.
I'm proposing a frame-based (Word-like) scheme -- where metadata are
not considered to occupy the same data stream as the content, even
conceptually.
In a code-based scheme, metadata must be handled sequentially because
they _are_ sequential (along with the content). In a frame-based
scheme, metadata do not need to have a sequence artificially imposed
when it does not belong; but then you need to create a way to access
data in a not-particularly-sequential fashion.
I favor frame-based editors (and frame-based metadata for Perl too :-)).
At the Conference, I was pleased to speak at length with Ted Nelson on
many subjects, and made the point to me that one of the Xanadu
system's best features was its total separation of markup
(i.e. formatting and hyperlinks) from content.
Can you provide more context/details?
I can't ever do justice to Ted's ideas. But his idea was a WWW-like service
where each person can create his own farm of hyperlinks -- content need not
have all of its hyperlinks included at creation time; rather, hyperlinks are
added on by people who discover/decide where it would be a good idea to link
things. And my set of links may not be the same as your set, since your idea
of relevant connection may differ from mine.
--
Chip Salzenberg - a.k.a. -
<chip(_at_)perlsupport(_dot_)com>
"... under cover of afternoon in the biggest car in the county?!" //MST3K
