From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
Message-ID: <4641588cc2f8f1f35ccf4ea12b88bd1b@quanstro.net>
To: 9fans@9fans.net
From: erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2008 11:05:07 -0500
In-Reply-To: <4926D977.2080900@proweb.co.uk>
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Subject: Re: [9fans] web-based plan 9?
Topicbox-Message-UUID: 4f5ab6ae-ead4-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025

> xmlfs is a pain because it has anonymous entries so you need a way of
> organising it
>
> <xml>
> <a><b>123</b></a>
> <a><b>456</b></a>
> </xml>

once upon a time, when god was a small boy i worked
on a distributed search product.  the search engine we
were using was OpenText whose chief tech guy was
(drumroll) tim bray.  ot returned hitlists as byte offsets
encoded in (oh, you'll never guess) xml.  i don't recall
the formatting exactly, but a hitlist looked something
like
<hitlist><hit><start>2313131</start><end>2313138</end></hit>...
one can imagine that using careful formatting to increase
the amount of data that needed to be moved by an order
of magnitude resulted in spectacular performance.

ah, the good old days.

- erik