The ~document chaos is real, but it's terminological chaos from before computing that turns into trouble when you're trying to mark it up. Before computers, yo

The ~document chaos is real, but it's terminological chaos from before computing that turns into trouble when you're trying to mark it up. Before computers, you could still reasonably use the term document to refer to things as different as an essay, poem, book manuscript, CV, patent, birth certificate, voter-registration form, and a court transcript. It would be nice to cleave them apart, but that'll take a lot of work since our human languages have a dearth of good terms for discriminating between highly-structured and mostly-unstructured documents. I struggled through writing something roughly about this last year: https://t-ravis.com/post/doc/what_color_is_your_markup/ https://t-ravis.com/post/doc/what_color_is_your_markup/ In those terms, the markup depicted in the linked piece's "document" is basically all "structural" markup--and I feel like this is the least interesting part of an unstructured document. It's the same logic that translates a paper address-change form into structured data describing what's in the fields--but it doesn't yield any of the leverage that we get from the meaningful associations in the form-as-markup. We can't do much more with the structural markup of a free-form document than present it and perhaps translate it to other formats with similar idioms. Structure in this kind of document is somewhat capricious (if five different writers wrote exactly the same 20 pages of text, they might all still use different section/paragraph/sentence boundaries). The bigger leverage in free-form documents comes from ontological markup that annotates what's being written about. This is what's going to enable you to bolt on an interesting extension that your readers can use to jump between every section on your site that discusses the same paper or author. Or enable you to automatically inject birth/death/release dates for people, films, and albums you refer to. (I don't mean to suggest the post precludes these--but the verbosity comparison feels much less fair without enough inline annotation to provide a similar level of utility as the star record.)