Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se writes:
I'm skeptic to your proposition that this would indeed be a workable solution for the problem at hand. Is there any running prototype to prove it?
The Perseus Project uses something along these lines (IIRC, you can retrieve complete books, chapters, or sections) - but I guess the technology they use predates XPath/Xpointer. Or look at our beloved "copyrighted" Adelung project http://mdz.bib-bvb.de/digbib/lexika/adelung/text/band1/@Generic__BookView;cs... - I'm quite sure they make use of an XML storage system (Dynaweb?).
If you use idzebra you can send arbitrary XPath statements to the database back-end and thus you can extract "quotes". Using XLink you can even embed them properly ;)