Re: Autoexpanding ZIP archives?

On Wed, 2005-12-07 at 16:28 -0500, John Peacock wrote:
> Peter N. Lundblad wrote:
> > Why wouldn't the binary diff algorithm be suitable for XML documents?

> It is, but that isn't the smallest possible diff for that document type,
> which could be generated by some magical xmldiff like one of these:

Would these generate the exact same target file, byte for byte? If not,
they're probably not suitable for the job.

Even if we did allow fudging of the target file, I'm not sure it's safe
to reorder attributes or sub-elements of an XML file, so I think all
you'd really get is whitespace-independence. Whitespace independence
can net you some substantial gains relative to a line-based diff
algorithm in pathological cases, but relative to a binary algorithm it
doesn't seem like such a win.

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Received on Wed Dec 7 23:05:47 2005