>> Nonetheless, I would like to hear if you know of any >> backend tools that would serve such a purpose. Does >> DeltaXML at >> http://www.deltaxml.com/products/index.html fit your >> architectural thinking? >> > > No. Our first studies have shown that > - the problem of storing efficiently changes made to XML files > is very different from > - the problem of showing/explaining these changes to the user. > (We may be wrong. May be DeltaXML is an incredibly good product.) > > We have a similar use case in our specific domain (aeronautical information) and I agree with Hussein: presentation of changes is different from marking the changes. We solve this use case this way: - authors edit a new version of a document; they don't see the changes in any special way within XXE. - then they use one of our softwares to find the differences between 2 versions and mark the new one; - versions can be managed by the user (i.e., keep 2 files) or by a document management system. - the changes are nicely presented to readers after transformation into HTML.
So, we do have a backend tool that serve this purpose, but it's currently limited to a specific application domain[1]. It's probably not your domain of interest, but we're surely not alone to do this. On the other hand, other document editors such as Microsoft Word and XMetal are able to automatically record changes made by authors. But, I expect the mark-up to be much cleaner when it's done after authors have finished their job. Another use case we have is to show changes to authors, within XXE, but then authors must mark the changes themselves. We did that using Docbook's revisionflag attribute. Our client wanted manual control over this revision flag anyway. An author declares that a paragraph or list item is deleted or inserted or changed. Depending on this revision status, the text is shown within XXE in a different colour. When publishing in HTML, we use a background colour to show changes. When publishing in PDF, we generate a change bar in the margin. Our client would like to offer these customisations as open source software, so that perhaps XMLMind would distribute them with XXE, but we haven't had the time yet to prepare our code for distribution. It involved custom CSS and publication commands in the Docbook menu. Cheers, Benoit [1] If you're interested, have a look at: http://www.synclude.com/Products/eAIPDiff.html eAIPDiff finds differences between 2 "electronic Aeronautical Information Publication" (eAIP) documents. We integrate it in our document management system, GroupVerve: http://www.synclude.com/Products/groupverve.html to provide traceability of changes and version management using CVS as backend and a lot of meta-data. -- Benoit Maisonny benoit at synclude.com Director & Consultant http://synclude.com Synclude
