On 8/28/06, Jay R. Ashworth <jra(a)baylink.com> wrote:
Because in wikitext, everything is in-band; in XML,
the structure is
out-of-band, on purpose. This requires an entirely different, and I
suspect, much more complicated diff algorithm.
I don't know what "in-band" and "out-of-band" mean ([[Out of
band]]
doesn't help either), but if the diff engine parses the XML, it can
look for a) changes in structure/markup and b) changes in content.
Either one should be very easy and fast to diff, given XML-parsing
library functions (for the C++ module used on WMF sites, that is).
Faster than present, I don't know, but the present differ is hardly a
bottleneck.