[wp-docs] New WordPress Handbook

[Mike Little]

Sorry I didn't reply to this earlier...

2009/1/30 Matt Mullenweg <m at mullenweg.com>:
> Mike Little wrote:
>>
>
>> Which brings me to a  second problem. Subversion does not to my
>> knowledge diff xml files as xml files. That is, it does not understand
>> the semantics of an xml file structure. It treats them as ascii
>> records (lines) and that doesn't work for structured files. I am not
>> aware of a third party add-on that will do the job either (subversion
>> supports pluggable diff engines). At least not an open source one.
>
> I'm not sure what's the matter with this, any different than using
> Subversion to manage a HTML file. Why does the diff engine need to be aware
> of the markup language?
>

In my experience, the main problem is when you have XML structured
files with a large element that is wrapped by the XML editor across
say, 30 lines. If you change a single word at the beginiing of that
element, the whole element gets re-wrapped.

As far as Subversion is concerned, it will see 30 changed lines
instead one changed element. When you get a large number of these, it
can be tiresome to see what has really changed.

When you add in the idea of multiple people editing the same resource,
where someone might change a single word at the opposite end of the
same element. Subversion in that case would likely show a conflict for
every line of that element whereas, the change ought to be easy to
merge.

When the XML files are the size of those in the subversion book, I
would imagine that it would quickly become an impossible task to use
subversion to manage changes XML files in the same way you would
manage code changes.

It is quite a while since I tried to manage structured documents in
this way, so it may be that things have improved.


mIKE
-- 
Mike Little
http://zed1.com/