Jeff Hooker wrote: > > Hmmm. Interesting; the basic DeltaXML Core docbook pipeline actually already > does a really good job of using the revisionflag attribute and the phrase > element to display node and inline changes, and to my experience the > difficulties concerned with display are mostly limited to tables that have > had funky things done with the morerows and morecells attributes. If you > haven't taken a good look at DeltaXML in a while, I'd highly recommend it; I > spent a long, long time looking for products to do differencing and they were > head and shoulders above anything else I found. >
Thank you for the information. The approach you describe has pros and cons: Pros: ----- * Simple to style using CSS. * Built-in support by the DocBook XSL style sheets (well, I suppose). Cons: ----- * Cannot express all changes without generating invalid documents. DocBook 5 example: chapter 1 of version 1 has a title. chapter 1 of version 2 has a info containing a title. How do you express: title deleted, info+title inserted. A valid chapter cannot have both a title and an info+title. * Cannot express changes in attributes values. * Marking changes with elements and attributes is inherently inelegant because you mix true contents and meta-contents. Moreover, a naive user may be tempted to manually edit the revision elements and attributes. * Ideally, a ``mark change'' should be an action allowing to cancel it (undo it) and providing info about who did it, when and why. * Cannot be used for all document types (those not having revision elements and attributes). In summary, we think that using revision elements and attributes is OK as long as you limit the use of such annotated documents to printing, conversion to HTML, etc, or to read-only display on screen (XXE supports read-only display on screen quite well). However, it is a very good thing that DeltaXML exists and performs well for your specific needs. > Roll that in with the fact that it's a java app with a good API and it seems > like a natural fit. > We have contacted DeltaXML in order to get a quote for an OEM license (i.e. royalty-free, similar to our own Developer License), but their answer was: we don't sell OEM licenses because this would mean less direct sales.
