Granularity in Structured Documents

Structured documents have become a widely accepted concept for document manipulation applications like editing, formatting, and archiving. However, some aspects of structured documents are still not well understood. In particular, the transition in structured documents from logical structure to contents, is a grey area in which different systems use different interpretations. In this article, we discuss this granularity aspect of structured documents. We focus on the underlying concepts of structured documents without referring to any application, so that this discussion is kept clear from aspects that are not related to structured documents.