There are No Documents
Allen H. Renear, Karen M. Wickett · Balisage series on markup technologies · 2010
Last year at Balisage (2009) we considered the claim that documents cannot be modified. Our analysis took the form of identifying and evaluating possible responses to this inconsistent triad: 1) Documents are strings; 2) Strings cannot be modified; 3) Documents can be modified. Late this spring we were surprised to realize that our survey of possible responses to the document modifiability puzzle had overlooked one response: There are no documents. We turn to that neglected response now.