[xml-h] Belated introduction: Indexing

[John Cowan]

Dorothea Salo scripsit:

>     I wrote a rant for my weblog yesterday that I meant to write some time
> ago (minus the ranty bits) and use as an introduction to this list -- but as
> it happened, I was out of town when the introduction wave hit.

Welcome, and glad to see us on the same mailing list again.

I'm not sure why you say that LMNL doesn't hit the sweet spot for indexing:
overlapping markup is what it does very well.  What it doesn't do so well,
at least in the current form, is *structural* markup: in particular,
[A}[B}foo{B]{A], [A}[B}foo{A]{B], [B}[A}foo{B]{A], and [B}[A}foo{A]{B],
all mean exactly the same thing: three characters "f", "o", "o" which
constitute both range A and range B.  To escape this unsatisfying conclusion,
one has to use layers, which are just as crufty in LMNL as milestones are
in SGML/XML.

It's not too late to fix LMNL, if we can figure out how.

-- 
John Cowan                                jcowan at reutershealth.com
At times of peril or dubitation,          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Perform swift circular ambulation,        http://www.reutershealth.com
With loud and high-pitched ululation.