Why does structure matter?
The close association between form and structure was not a problem while the principal goal of creating an electronic document was to render text for output on paper and there was no expectation that there would be any automated processing of components within that document. However in the publishing industry, a document typically underwent a considerable degree of automated processing between its authorship and its rendition on paper. Now, the volume of documents stored and distributed in electronic forms (especially via the WWW) dictates that there is a growing need to be able to perform more sophisticated processing (indexing, searching, abstracting, rendering in new media and new encoding formats) in ways which require that the processing applications can access structural data about those documents. Even basic navigational tools like tables of contents rely on the capacity to distinguish elements like section headings from surrounding text. Consider the element types noted in the
