Re: enriched-mode and switching major modes.

[Oliver Scholz]

Oliver Scholz <address@hidden> writes:

[...]
> I am not sure that I understand what you mean here.  First and
> foremost I want that data structure to preserve the information
> contained in a specific file format (here: XML).  
>
> Then, to implement CSS I need an interface to whatever data structure
> I use that presents it as a tree.
[...]

On a second thought: this latter is---strictly speaking---not quite
true.  If I have a data structure that is not a tree, but for whose
parts I can compute tree-like relations on demand (that is thus an
instance of the XML info set), then there is no apriori requirement to
always work with an interface that presents that data structure as a
tree.  Thus it might be possible to implement an engine applying and
querying formatting properties, that works by interfacing to the
underlying data structure (like solution #2, for instance) directly
(though I have no idea yet how).

So, the exact specifica of the underlying data structure and the
interface to it are not as irrelevant to the rest of the architecture,
efficiency-wise, as it might have seemed in one of my last posting.
Maybe that is what you meant.

But I have to start somewhere.  The tree interface to this kind of
documents is well known and tested in practice.  Almost every
specification talks about trees.  So if there are no principal
objections to improving Emacs to better work with trees-in-a-buffer in
the long run, I think that I fare better by assuming a tree-interface.


    Oliver
-- 
Oliver Scholz               3 Vendémiaire an 213 de la Révolution
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