Let's take that thought one step further. After parsing the document you have a parsed tree. Today, these parsed trees are thrown away on each parse. When a change is made to the document, it is then 100% re-parsed. Instead of throwing the parsed tree away, merely do a fix-up on the existing tree. With such a system you never parse an entire document. Only one element at a time.
Now imagine that the parsed tree were available to all participants. Changes to the document would be cooperative instead of collaborative as is the case today. No merging. No collisions. No repetitive parsing.
Style is not an issue since all style (ie, presentation) is subordinate to the semantic tree. For an example of how to get this wrong, review Adobe's PDL (page definition language) which subordinated semantics to style (ie, the page) which is the reverse of what it linguistically should be.
]]>After all these years there is still not a viable document tool on the market that implements SGML. Killing Word will not make that happen either. I'm working on one such tool (see www dot hivewareforword dot com). With such an SGML-based tool, documents could be processed in parallel with all its participants writing simultaneously. Files and folders would not exist. And there would be no such thing as merging various copies of documents. The cloud is not the answer, which merely postpones simultaneous editing problems, so forget Office 365. And forget SharePoint, which is merely a check-in/check-out database system.
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