Re: [sword-devel] HELP! Need your feedback on XML Markup Language

[David Burry]

Interesting discussion.  There is another way to do multiple 
hierarchies:  Instead of trying to think of the best way to store our data 
in XML that will be a catch all for every possible hierarchy, we could have 
our own database structure that isn't XML, ideally optimized more for space 
and/or speed of querying than straight XML would be.  Then we could have an 
engine that queries/searches this and creates various XML representations 
of this on the fly, depending on how the front end needs it (and each front 
end could simply have their own XSLT to format it properly for 
display).  This is so very different than what we're doing it may not be 
worth it for sword, but it's still something to theorize about.

I've actually been working on a separate non-sword system like this on and 
off for the past couple years, using various Berkley DB tables for the 
texts and language and search index data... I have not yet properly glued 
in the XML/XSLT part but it's kind of exciting to think about.

Dave