- From: olivier Thereaux <ot@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2009 15:24:26 -0500
- To: Karl Dubost <karl+w3c@la-grange.net>
- Cc: Jean-Guilhem Rouel <jean-gui@w3.org>, "public-qa-dev@w3.org list" <public-qa-dev@w3.org>
Hi Karl, On 23-Jan-09, at 2:44 PM, Karl Dubost wrote: > I wanted to compare two css so I started to look for something > around. There is already indeed a [service][1] which was created a > while ago it seems. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be working very > well. > > I was wondering how hard it would be to create such a service and/or > program. > The results could hide things in common and just show the differences. I don't think I ever saw any good CSS-specific diff engine. Given the number of (open source) CSS parser existing, I suspect it wouldn't be too too hard to do. What you need is: 1) a CSS parser. Ideally somewhat fault tolerant, at least tolerant to a good number of typos 2) your parser should be able to serialize what it parsed in a normalized way. (whatever the normalization) 3) diff on the above. Voila! In a way, the CSS validator does most of that. When you validate a CSS file, it will output the (cleaneed-up) result of its parsing. In theory, one could do that twice and compare. The brave could take the XML output of the CSS validator (although I would really not recommend that) and place the burden on one of the available XML diffing tool. The very brave could take the CSS parser from the CSS validator and do that in Java. There's this, too, in (y)our language of choice - a parser to build upon http://code.google.com/p/cssutils/ -- olivier
Received on Friday, 23 January 2009 20:24:34 UTC