[sword-devel] search idea

[sword-devel@crosswire.org]

Paul Gear wrote:

> If file size is a problem, throw in a gzip in the file I/O part.  I understand zlib works pretty well
> there, and bzip2 also has a library.  Far better to do that than to have a markup where you're not
> sure whether '<bt>' means 'book title' or 'bibliography text'.  Long tag names take up more space, but
> this can be overcome with compression, and the benefits for understandability are enormous.  (And if
> you start complaining about too many keystrokes, i'll start talking about macros...  ;-)

I would protest the extra overhead of every read operation needing to parse
the extra characters.  After all a markup language will usually be read and
processed by a program where <bt> would be easier to use than <book title>
and only use about 1/3 of the space, and processing.  There will be very
few people that will compose ThML manually, just as there are very few that
compose HTML manually.

I would doubt that very many people will ever need to read and decode ThML
so I think that the language should be designed with minimal tag lengths to
ease parsing.

It is illogical to design a language where the process which is done once
is made easy at the expense of the process that is performed millions of
times.

But this is just my opinion.

--
   Darwin Gregory

   Creation is more scientifically valid than evolution!