>>106
I like the idea of Elision, but I have a problem with it. It's the same problem that Terry Tao has with doing math on a computer, namely that the act of writing words, just as the active writing mathematics, relies on making stuff up. Making up new words, or new symbols. You can have dictionaries and store stuff in them, but you need to be able to handle these new words in a context consistent way. You need to be able to distribute these new words, and have them available in a context consistent way. When you distribute a document, you would need to also distribute the custom dictionary with it. But what about when you end up with a domain specific subset of the dictionary, say a medical dictionary or an engineering dictionary, which have words specific to a discipline. Do you expect these people to come together and maintain their own dictionaries? If so, there need to be faciliites for that.
Portability is another concern, though one I believe you addressed. I would almost see documents as something like this
{:dictionary {0x01AF {:display "string of chars or whatever"
:metadata {:stuff [...]}}}
:document [0x01AF 0x020 ...]}