Chip Salzenberg writes:
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.
I do not follow this remark. Care to explain?
What *I* had in mind that "almost 3/4 of" is represented by the string
"almost 34 of"
```
xyz
with markups:
x = start fraction
y = boundary between numerator and denominator;
z = end of fraction
between chars.
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.
My experiments with eText show that very simple rules create a
complete illusion of intelligent behaviour. ;-) The situation with
eText is allevivated by the decision to make the markup have width, so
there is no question whether inserting of "5" between "3" and "4" in
the above example results in 35/4 or 3/54.
Ilya
