I would love to see the diffs in an article highlighted (yellow background or something) within the context of the entire page. Say, the current vesrion is 1.7 and I compare to 1.3, then I want to see the 1.7 article with all changed lines (since 1.3) with colored background (changed and added might get diffrent color (or arrows like in the diff pages now)). The reason is, if I see a new paragraph, I would like to see the context of the paragraph....

-- MichaelScharf - 13 Jul 2000

True, it is sometimes difficult to see the context of changes in a long topic.

This is an implementation issue: Rdiff could show the whole text of the newer revision and the changes within using different colors.

But it is also a usability issue: Switch mode (diff only / whole text) in user preferences? Or offer only whole text mode? If there are more then two versions to compare, it probably does not make sense to see the whole text of each version.

-- PeterThoeny - 15 Jul 2000

CvsWeb's diff interface can be consulted for pretty good ideas on how to show diffs. Here's a sample url

http://stud.fh-heilbronn.de/~zeller/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/cvsweb/cvsweb.cgi.diff?r1=1.96&r2=1.97

-- ManpreetSingh - 16 Sep 2000

This seemed like a good idea, so we went off and implemented it. Basically we just had to add a reference to another diff (yadiff -- Yet Another Diff). The yadiff command uses the same syntax as the rdiff command. We put the following change in the rdiff template.

<TABLE width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="0">
  <TR BGCOLOR="#F9D1C9">
    <TD valign="top">
      Topic <B>RdiffShouldShowContext</B> . {
      <A href="/cgi-bin/yadiff/Codev/RdiffShouldShowContext">Side-by-side
diffs</A>
      |
      <A href="/cgi-bin/rdiff/Codev/RdiffShouldShowContext">Diffs</A>
      %REVISIONS% }
    </TD>
  </TR>
</TABLE>

I'm interested in whether or not you think this is a good add? I was kind of hoping to be able to get more context, but because wiki uses html, its difficult gather context without running into trouble with partial tags. In fact, its possible that there are circumstances where this will fail with what we have. But it does seem to work most of the time.

I attached the two perl files that implement the diff. They should be able to be dropped in to the twiki bin directory without modification of any other files in there. If I am mistaken, let me know. Its been a while since I've looked at this.

HTMLDiff.pm (HTML Diff perl module)

yadiff (yadiff (Yet Another Diff). Similar to rdiff)

-- MichaelKirby - 17 Jan 2001

I created a side-by-side diff a while ago for Dec 2000 and have recently upgraded it to Dec 2001. It's a simple drop-in replacement for rdiff. I have it as rdiff.side-by-side in my twiki and I pointed all of my templates to it. The script prints out a link at the top for the old diff version.

• rdiff.side-by-side: Side-by-side rdiff.

-- JosephWasson - 05 Jun 2002

I have added the side-by-side diff to my test wiki, and I htink i like it much more than the default. I am probably going to commit a configurable merge of the 2 at some stage. I have also tried yadiff, but with less success. it does not show meta data at all, and does not do the "show all page histories" - I have updated it to the current cvs though (and will attach them soon)

-- SvenDowideit - 19 Mar 2004

Before you commit, Sven, MS did some experiments with context diffs in O'Wiki that looked really good; basically he was able to display diffs using highlights in the document. He was going off to look at character-level diffs, though I don't know what came of it. Either way, you should talk to him before commiting.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 19 Mar 2004

I think that I can create the effect that OWiki has using the current code, and some CSS (add background to TWikiAddedText, possibly hide TWikiAddedMarker etc) and by setting ?context=1000. which is similar to what you see when you click inline-diff on WebChangesForAllWebs

so baring docco and implementation that will be tracked through TWikiFormsDiffRendering, this idea has been implemented

-- SvenDowideit - 09 May 2004