Re: Enlightenment via avoiding the T-word

[Kian-Tat Lim <ktl@ktlim.com>]

Nicolas LEHUEN wrote:
> I think that context-independant processing of structured data is VERY rare.

	<a href="uri"> </a> can be and is processed context-independently
every day by millions of users/computers.  (Not just browsers of both
graphical and text-based types, but also spiders and other crawlers.)

	Just today I was working on a program that extracts data from
(non-XML) "tagged" files.  Different records in these files may contain
different fields.  The program only has to understand the equivalents
of start and end tags for the "elements" it is interested in, regardless
of the other information in the record.

	One might argue that word processors perform various kinds of
context-independent processing, though their data is usually very weakly
structured.

	Admittedly, all of these examples are probably much smaller than
the sum total of all processing being done in EDI systems, SQL databases,
etc., but I don't think they're negligible, and, particularly in the
document world, I think they are representative of future growth paths.
(In other words, I'd like to see more context-independent processing of
structured data, as I believe it leads to more openness, reuse, and
hence efficiency.)

-- 
Kian-Tat Lim, ktl@ktlim.com, UTF-7: +Z5de+pBU-