----- Original Message -----
From: "George Herbert" george.herbert@gmail.com
A text-based diff of XML sucks, but how about a DOM based (structural) diff?
Sure, but how much more processor horsepower is that going to take.
Scale is a driver in Mediawiki, for obvious reasons.
I suspect that diffs are relatively rare events in the day to day WMF processing, though non-trivial.
Every single time you make an edit, unless I badly misunderstand the current architecture; that's how it's possible for multiple people editing the same article not to collide unless their edits actually collide at the paragraph level.
Not to mention pulling old versions.
Can someone who knows the current code better than me confirm or deny?
Cheers, -- jra