[Dojo-interest] DocBook and XMLmind XML Editor

[Kirby Files]

Daniel wrote on 12/06/2007 05:30 PM:
> So, does DocBook have track-changes?
> 
> Well, it has a track-changes tag which has the right effect, but having 
> to type tags will get awkward when you make substantial changes. Today I 
> heard about a program that takes two DocBook files and gives you a 
> "diff" version with track changes.
> 
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/diffmk/

I'm always interested in XML differencing algorithms, so I checked out 
DiffMk. Yikes, this doesn't look like a winner. It seems to provide 
flaky results, and has dreadful performance for large XML files. Not 
to mention the project appears to have one developer, no docs, and the 
current version has been in alpha for 8 months.

I really like the "xml algebra" approach of the XML Operator:

http://www.living-pages.de/de/projects/xop/

With xop, you can "add" or "subtract" XML documents, or do unary tests 
on them. So, you could get all inserted changes by doing:

xop new.xml - old.xml > diff.xml

Now, all XML Diff tools have tradeoffs. In the case of xop, if some 
attributes on an element change, but no elements are added or deleted, 
the diff contains just the element and the changed attribute, but may 
omit key context (like, say the id attribute).

Some other XML tools to consider, though I haven't found them useful:

http://diffxml.sourceforge.net/downloads.html
http://tdm.berlios.de/3dm/doc/index.html (which has a GUI, but a 
strange output format)

Thanks,
   --kirby