On Tue, Aug 29, 2006 at 09:32:48AM +0200, Steve Bennett wrote:
On 8/29/06, Simetrical Simetrical+wikitech@gmail.com wrote:
I don't know what "in-band" and "out-of-band" mean ([[Out of band]] 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.
I think what's meant is that with XML, it's basically trivial to separate text from markup - depending on how you receive the XML, that may already have been done for you. The structure and formatting thus occupies a completely separate "band" to the text being formatted.
Whereas Wikitext is a nightmare to parse :)
My point was that it's a bastard to parse, but it seems intuitively that it would be *easier* to diff.
And as to "it's never going to happen"...
Never's a *long* time; if we wish to engage in gedankenexperiments about how to do an implementation that's "never going to happen"...
who cares?
Cheers, -- jra