Re: DIFF method

I wasn't questioning the desirability (from a client's perspective) of
having a DIFF method, but was just pointing out that the challenge is
to come up with a standard result format that more than one server will
be willing/able to produce.

Cheers,
Geoff

Werner wrote on 03/20/2006 08:24:55 AM:

> Geoffrey M Clemm wrote:
> > The only interesting thing about a DIFF method is the format of its 
result.
> > There was such a wide variation in the different formats that diff 
tools 
> > use for different types of resources that it didn't appear to be 
something 
> > on which we could get consensus.  There are some standards for diff 
formats, 
> > e.g., http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3284.txt?number=3284 (The VCDIFF 
Generic 
> > Differencing and Compression Data Format) and some new ones being 
> > proposed, e.g., 
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-simple-xcap-diff-03.txt 
> 
> The diff calculation itself can require software that can't be 
distributed
> to clients, because of licensing limitations, programming language, 
resources
> or whatever. Note that it can be more than just a diff of text files. I
> will use DeltaXML, for example, which is specialised in calculating the 
diff
> between two XML documents. It inserts mark-up in its own namespace in 
the
> resulting document.
> 
> The format can also be converted on the fly, depending on the "Accept"
> request header. I could convert it to PDF, again with tools that are 
only
> available on the server.
> 
> > Cheers,
> > Geoff
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Werner.
> 
> > 
> > Werner wrote on 03/20/2006 04:28:34 AM:
> >> Shouldn't there be a DIFF method? Calculating the difference between
> >> two versions may be a very specialised operation for some document
> >> formats. The software or resources to accomplish it may not be 
available
> >> to clients.
> 
> -- 
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