On Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:45:24 +0100, Thomas Lotze wrote: >> What's your real problem, or use case? Are you just concerned with >> diffing, or are others likely to read the xml, and want it formatted the >> way it already is? > > I'd like to put the XML under revision control along with other stuff. > Other people should be able to make sense of the diffs and I'd rather not > require them to configure their tools to use some XML differ.
In which case, the data format isn't "XML", but a subset of it (and probably an under-defined subset at that, unless you invest a lot of effort in defining it). That defeats one of the advantages of using a standardised "container" format such as XML, i.e. being able to take advantage of existing tools and libraries (which will be written to the offical standard, not to your private "standard"). One option is to require the files to be in a canonical form. Depending upon your revision control system, you may be able to configure it to either check that updated files are in this form, or even to convert them automatically. If your existing files aren't in such a form, there will be a one-time penalty (i.e. a huge diff) when converting the files. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
