Netocrat wrote:
What is/are the reason/s for storing the full text of page revisions in the database as opposed to some form of differential?
Expedience; it hasn't been written yet.
Am I correct in assuming that speed has been given priority over storage space requirements, and if so, has any benchmarking been done to find out how much overhead would be added by storing revision as diffs and how much space would be saved?
See Tim's presentation from 21C3: http://zwinger.wikimedia.org/berlin/
Also, has there been any discussion of the possibility of branching a page (as is possible in e.g. a CVS repository)?
Not really. Tagging of revisions is likely to happen soonish, branching not so likely.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)