[darcs-devel] PatchPlugins / XML files

[Max Battcher]

Allan Lyons wrote:
> If I come up with something that works for arbitrary, valid XML, would 
> anyone else be interested?

There's certainly quite a bit of interest in such work from what I've 
heard.  A particular scenario would be if you can generate light-weight 
patches for the large zipped XML files (ODF, some OOXML) that are much 
kinder than the current large binary patches for these files.  Albeit 
that brings up the issue of zip-transparent patch types, which have been 
debated but nothing yet has happened on that front either.

One issue to consider, however is the question of "valid".  Presumably 
you aren't talking about constraining to well-described schema (as in 
the XML world usage of "valid") and instead just mean syntactically 
valid.  Even then, David Roundry has expressed concern that even 
syntactically invalid documents may need to be expressed (consider an 
XML document in progress composed in a text editor and not syntactically 
validated until "finished"), so there'd need to be some sort of fallback 
mechanism in that case.

--
--Max Battcher--
http://www.worldmaker.net/