On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 8:57 PM, Rogan Dawes <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > saurabh gupta wrote: >>>> However, I think in merging and notifying about the conflicts in the xml >>>> files, other things can also be put forward. Like the GUI will show the >>>> number of tags differing and what are the new tags added and even if any >>>> tag is renamed with the content unchanged. If possible, how about >>>> showing a tree like structure (just like DOM model) to compare (or diff) >>>> the two xml files. >>> >>> This is a little bit too low-level for my liking. Taking the OpenOffice >>> example again, the GUI should not expose XML at all... >> >> hmmmm.....I think I get your point somewhat. Let me do some research >> over the formats and the background formats in which tools like >> OpenOffice store the data in xml files. May be for docbooks by >> OpenOffice, the best thing would be to give the *diff* output in terms >> of lines. >> I would also appreciate to know what you think and would like to see >> the output in such case. > > I think that the implementation may make use of features inherent in the > file format where possible. e.g. I suspect that OpenOffice has the > ability to show "Tracked changes", and then allow the user to view the > changes using the actual OpenOffice implementation. > > I suspect that that will get a lot more difficult with e.g. conflicts > and merges, because I doubt that OOo has the ability to show changes > from multiple versions. > > But I have to agree with Dscho, that the output would have to depend on > the file type (OOo document), not just the data structure (e.g. XML) > inside the file. > > A regular XML file diff could choose to ignore/collapse whitespace > (pretty printing) when doing the comparison, to show things like moving > a branch further down the tree. > > e.g. > > <i>text</i> > > vs > > <b><i>text</i></b> > > vs > > <b> > <i>text</i> > </b> > > For plain XML, a textual diff might choose to show it with each element > un-indented, and a standard text diff output: > > + <b> > <i> > text > </i> > + </b> > > while a GUI diff might show the new element highlighted in a tree: > > #green#<b>#/green# > <i> > text > > I think that where reasonable that you should aim to have a text-only > version that could be wrapped by a GUI. Obviously, this would be > meaningless when diffing a JPG, for instance. All right. I got what you mean to say. > > Ok, that was a bit rambling. I hope it helped more than it confused. > > Rogan > -- Saurabh Gupta Senior, Electronics and Communication Engg. NSIT,New Delhi, India -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
