Re: Is XML text?

Pierre THIERRY wrote:
> I think that citation is pretty clear. And XML has always been meant to
> be human-readable. The following is taken from the XML Technical

Human readable is not the same thing as machine readable. XML files are
structured data files, where the structure has a certain amount of permissible
variability (e.g. certain whitespace is optional but other is not).

Without reading the entire XML file into memory it is, in general, impossible to
perform the kind of analysis that diff requires. I believe that the last time
this came up, someone said there was a least one xmldiff-like program which
could deal with this, but then the difficulty is how to switch to that internally.

Some XML files could be diff'd using the built in tool and remain well-formed;
others (especially machine generated) could not. The status quo is appropriate
until such time as an XMLdiff can be added to the core libraries.

John

-- 
John Peacock
Director of Information Research and Technology
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
4720 Boston Way
Lanham, MD 20706
301-459-3366 x.5010
fax 301-429-5747
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@subversion.tigris.org