Re: Change bars

William M. Perry (wmperry@mango.ucs.indiana.edu)
Fri, 06 Aug 1993 12:51:36 -0500


Thus wrote:
[...]
>I don't know the data structures very well, but libWWW's Structured
>Streams could be a good place to start for such a canonical representation.
>Presumably SS's are series' of text blocks and tag structures, and the
>Diff operations can be standards text editing operations on text blocks
>and structure edits on tags.
>
>One tricky issue is how to refer to objects in a SS; I suppose we could
>refer to tag ids when possible but otherwise by ordinal position in the
>SS. This would make use of the format somewhat brittle (tricky hand
>creation of Diffs!), and would work best when transparent to all users.

Another problem with this is - what about the browsers/browser
writers that don't use the libWWW? Why not use a context-style diff
but ignore differences in white-space? Strip out spaces and tabs
(except in PRE and XMP, etc), and go from there? (Should also remove
line breaks within <P></P> tags.

-Bill P.