Thanks for this feedback.
Benoit Maisonny wrote:
>
>>> 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.
>