February 17, 2005
Beginnings of Diffs for CLiki

There was a reason I wrote CL-DIFFLIB.

cliki diff links

Mostly it was to try to experiment with alternative CLiki RSS feeds, but certainly other wikis have found it useful to be able to display the differences between multiple revisions of a page.

cliki diff page

The next step is to tweak the tokenization a bit, then maybe offer a way to view just the changed portions of a page, perhaps with some surrounding context.

I do think that this way of presenting differences is probably more appropriate for a wiki than the standard diff-style parade of <'s, >'s, !'s, +'s and -'s.

> blah blah blah
> whee
< glah glah glah
< whirrr
Posted by jjwiseman at February 17, 2005 06:10 PM
Comments

Actually, I wish there was some rich text or hypertext version of diff that outputted in that manner for source code.

Posted by: Oliver on February 18, 2005 07:20 AM

Did anything promising come on the rss feed side of things?

Posted by: Zach Beane on February 18, 2005 01:17 PM

Not yet. I don't feel like I have a good idea of what to put in a useful RSS feed.

I think diffs would be good, but there are a few different formats I'm thinking about, and I'm not sure which to use. One is the full-page diff, as in the screenshot. Another is a side-by-side diff, like Wikipedia's. The third would be similar to the full-page diff, but with a more limited context around changes.

Another question is whether it makes sense to try to retain the current CLiki RSS practice of batching multiple edits together.

Posted by: John Wiseman on February 18, 2005 02:18 PM
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