He may have chosen a bad example, but his point is still true.
XML can have unordered collections. And there are programs that
will output the "same" collection in different orders at different
times. I've seen this many times. It does make it hard to diff
this sort of XML file. Don't know whether Word does this.
And then there's the issue of different XML that ends up looking
the same on the screen. So there's no difference to look at
but the XML is different.
-- Doug
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andy Levy [mailto:andy.levy_at_gmail.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 12:55 PM
> To: users_at_tortoisesvn.tigris.org
> Subject: Re: Merging is not happening for word documents.
>
> On Feb 13, 2008 3:41 PM, Ron Wilson <ronw.mrmx_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 2/13/08, Scott Grizzard <scott_at_scottgrizzard.com> wrote:
> > > If you change your Word settings to save documents in XML
> format, you can
> > > avoid (or at least mitigate) that problem in the future.
> XML documents are
> > > just text, and svn can merge those.
> >
> > Maybe. While XML files are just text, the order of the elements and
> > attributes could change without changing the actual content
> contained
> > with the XML markup. In the case of Word document, the
> actual textual
> > content might not change, but the order of some of the "supporting"
> > elements, or of attributes.
> >
> > Example:
> >
> > <a id="now"/><div id="3" class="quotation">Now it the time ...</div>
> >
> > is equivalent to:
> >
> > <div class="quotation" id="3"><a id="now"/>Now it the time ...</div>
> >
> > But the XML file is different. And would result in an SVN conflict.
>
> These two examples are not equivalent. In your first example, <a> and
> <div> are siblings. In the second, <a> is a child of <div> (create a
> small XML document for each and load them into something that shows
> the node tree structure like XMLSpy). VERY different. The end result,
> if transformed to HTML, functions the same, but the XML structures
> themselves are NOT equivalent.
>
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Received on 2008-02-14 03:28:31 CET