Unlike traditional parsers that work with document trees, IWE represents text as a directed graph where every header, paragraph, list, list item, code block, table, and reference becomes a node. Each node can have up to two primary relationships:
- next-element (the
nextfield in code): Points to the sibling node at the same hierarchical level - child-element (the
childfield in code): Points to the first child node (for container elements)
This creates a hybrid tree-graph structure that preserves both document hierarchy and enables complex cross-document relationships.
Structure and text content are stored separately: nodes capture the document hierarchy and relationships, while the text itself lives in a separate content store. This keeps graph operations fast and lets structural changes happen without copying text around.