Re: [xml-dev] XML Diff

["matthew pickard" <pickard.matthew@gmail.com>]

I never been impresses with any XML aware diff tools. You say Canonical XML... This betrays set issues.  What exactly does the the diff tool do.   Is it tree based?  Does it use a DOM?  Then you are comparing two DOMs.  Where they validated?  Then there's the whitespace issue, is it ignorable, or significant.  Still on the validation subject what about default values (DTD FIXED), or if you have schema are you going to be comparing to PSVIs.  Oh..., and is it going to resolve your entities...

These and many similar questions aside... Just what sort of XML are you going to compare, what does if describe.... Is it a regular relational type structure, is it mixed content and narrative in nature.  In the first case order may not be significant, and in the later it will.  In both cases whitespace too will play a different roles...

I once worked with an analyst who wrote his own XSLT diff tool.  It was fine because within his domain of discourse, differences and equality had a very restricted sense.     

In my favorite XML IDE there is a diff tool.  You can chose a number of modes, XML aware, line, character etc...  But often I fined plan old text base best.

My advice... If you can roll your own, or just used a vanilla diffing tool

best regards 

Matt

On 30/07/07, Richard Salz < rsalz@us.ibm.com> wrote:

> I will [probably] also be interested in XML cananonicalization (I
> have a copy - which I slightly modified - of James Clarke's), so if
> anyone knows of any good source for this process also ?

Check out the implementation of C14N that's part of various XML security
libraries.

        /r$

--
STSM, Senior Security Architect
DataPower SOA Appliances
http://www.ibm.com/software/integration/datapower/


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