Open AccessPlatform Independence 2010 - Helping Documents Fly Well in Emerging Architectures
Author(s) -
Ann M. Wrightson
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
balisage series on markup technologies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Conference proceedings
ISSN - 1947-2609
DOI - 10.4242/balisagevol5.wrightson01
Subject(s) - computer science , mainstream , heuristics , compiler , interoperability , xml , architecture , independence (probability theory) , bottleneck , world wide web , software , multimedia , software engineering , programming language , operating system , embedded system , art , philosophy , statistics , theology , mathematics , visual arts
Parallel processing and memory bottlenecks dominate current platform architecture conversations. After many years on the sidelines, parallel architectures are rapidly becoming mainstream, with more parallelism the obvious way to gain yet more performance. Feeding data to and from all these parallel cycles is also becoming more challenging. What does this have to do with XML? Surely all this is under the hood, something for compiler designers, software architects and other non-content people to worry about? The answer is that these issues can't be totally hidden under the hood. Balisageurs as content-folks and interoperability-folks need to pay attention now to the high level information design heuristics that will prevent our data structures being the ones that happen to run like treacle (or molasses) on the coming generations of faster, larger and neater systems.