Re: [xml-dev] "Maximize the ratio of content to markup" What's the underlying principle?

> The later version provides a higher ratio of content to code (tags).

some semantically rich markup has a ratio of 0.....

http://www.openmath.org/cd/arith1.xhtml#lcm


<OMOBJ xmlns="http://www.openmath.org/OpenMath" version="2.0" cdbase="http://www.openmath.org/cd">
  <OMA>
    <OMS cd="relation1" name="eq"/>
    <OMA>
      <OMS cd="arith1" name="lcm"/>
      <OMV name="a"/>
      <OMV name="b"/>
    </OMA>
    <OMA>
      <OMS cd="arith1" name="divide"/>
      <OMA>
        <OMS cd="arith1" name="times"/>
	<OMV name="a"/>
	<OMV name="b"/>
      </OMA>
      <OMA>
        <OMS cd="arith1" name="gcd"/>
        <OMV name="a"/>
        <OMV name="b"/>
      </OMA>
    </OMA>
  </OMA>
</OMOBJ>


 > Why do search engines prefer documents with a higher ratio of content
 > to markup?

A search engine can get a long way by ignoring the markup and just
indexing the text, if it is there. In something like the Openmath
example above, the search engine needs to know what the elements mean
otherwise it can't really index anything useful. On the other hand
a search engine that does understand OpenMath could get a lot more
reliable information from the XML than from the plain text version
 lcm(a,b) = a*b/gcd(a,b)


> What do you think?  Is there a principle of data design being
> illustrated here?  Can you articulate the principle?

No general principle other than that markup is needed when it's needed,
and not needed when it's not.

David

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