According to Ilya Zakharevich:
Chip Salzenberg writes:
As implemented in eText, the "structure" is a tree with leaves
carrying strings of textual data (and as usual, an arbitrary hash
associated to the whole structure).
I'm not comfortable with changing the basic structure of string data
from a flat sequence of characters into a tree structure.
No, there is no need to. The tree structure sits completely in the
markup, the string part is just
a) catenation of the leaves - with external markup;
b) leaves joined by markup "chars" - with inband markup;
Defining the content in terms of markup leaves would imply that no
text exists that does not participate in the metadata system somehow.
I don't feel comfortable with that, even as an abstraction.
There are some rules of consistency of markup. One should define
what the any "editing" operation is doing to markup.
I'm not going to even think about designing markup-rule-enforcement
into the metadata infrastructure of Perl's core.
You see, you thought about dead data only indeed!
No. I simply thought you were going for something a lot more
ambitious than simple insert- and delete- behavior flags, which
I can certainly support.
--
Chip Salzenberg - a.k.a. -
<chip(_at_)perlsupport(_dot_)com>
"... under cover of afternoon in the biggest car in the county?!" //MST3K
