Okay, I have answered to your other mail yesterday, now it is time that I answer also this one. 1. XML Sorry, but it is not XML that is about separating content from markup. Putting the formating out of markup has been the task of Cascaded Style Sheet, so that a same document (when correctly written) might be displayed on a computer screen, displayed on a mobile phone, printed, rendered into speech, embossed as braille into paper and so on. The role of XML was to make a simplier and cheaper to implement version of SGML. And SGML (for example DocBook) is about document structure. 2. Searching Nobody would expect to be able to search directly across words in any SGML format (for examples, DocBook, HTML or XML formats like AbiWord's), because words can be separated by any inline tag. This has not yet to do anything with formatting, formatting just add more of those "breaks". Please take a look at the example of the chapter 2.2 of the CSS2 specification http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2 . This is a XML file and you will not be able to search "his flute" ! (And even in Rich Text Format, you cannot search like that!) 2. "Mixing The Two Design" Sorry, here I cannot follow. What is horrible at, for example ((X)HTML + CSS2):
or similar. That would defeat the whole purpose of using xml. Again, XML is about seperating content from markup. Take a page like slashdot (the html), and try to read it. A xml document like kword is a lot more readable then that because you have a paragraph of text contained in 1 text tag. If we still want to use XML (and we do) AND do what you suggest, to insert
, etc into the text we would take twice the time for loading since we then mix 2 concepts, the XML concept and the markup-language concept. And this is very bad design. To illustrate this in other words; kword works in structures. We have frames in framesets and paragraphs etc. This nesting, and structuring is ideally illustrated in an XML document. Besides the perl script to do what you want to do is very easy to create in either case. Its not like its some obscure algorithm hidden in closed source software. Its just counting characters... And if we would change, in 2 months someone would come along and wants to search the xml documents, and complains that he can't find "some text" since we have "some text" in the XML... -- Thomas