• From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>
• To: "Michael Kay" <M.H.Kay@e...>, "Phani Adabala" <phani@w...>, <xml-dev@i...>
• Date: Wed, 04 Nov 1998 08:22:37 -0800

At 10:55 AM 11/4/98 -0000, Michael Kay wrote:
>My immediate answer to this is yes, all the information you need for a
>search engine is available via the SAX or DOM interface offered by many
>parsers.

I disagree.  Few parsers track byte offsets or other locational info in
the file, and I think you need that to do basic things like proximity
and phrase search.

>Of course you don't need to build your own search engine either, all you
>need to do is write an XML filter for an existing search engine. I'm
>surprised no-one seems to have done this yet.

I think you do need to build your own engine.  Reason is, most existing
search engines have an atomic-document view of the world, and break
down completely when asked to model a general recursive hierarchical
structure like XML. -Tim

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