Simetrical wrote:
doesn't help either), but if the diff engine parses the XML, it can look for a) changes in structure/markup and b) changes in content. Either one should be very easy and fast to diff
XML diffs are generally rather non-trivial (see e.g. http://www.unibw.de/rz/dokumente/getFILE?fid=1076019), though it would be somewhat easier for MediaWiki to get away with them, as we're talking about a strongly constrained XML schema.
In any case, I don't see much point in discussing this; it's been made abundantly clear that even comparatively minor and much saner changes in the syntax will not happen.