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Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
Wow are you seriously saying what I think you're saying here? In order to calculate a delta to an index, you would have to re-create the entire index, calculate the delta and then apply it to the on disk index. And you really expect me to believe that is faster than altering an in-memory DOM tree?
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No, I'm not saying that. Where did you learn software engineering? Any update to the document is a calculable delta which can be applied to a parse tree or index directly. (trivial example - inserting text moves indices that occur later in the document by the size of the text inserted). You can apply those deltas trivially and quickly and still have a valid index.
As for page boundaries, these are useful in any device that shows documents in page sized lumps and where the user expects to be able to go to a given page. It's a metaphor that will hang around for a very long time, not only as the one that makes sense in paper books, but also as a comprehensible measure of your location (one that makes much more sense than being 53.4% into a book!).