PaulReiber pointed me to RichardDrake's Wiki Clone called Why, hosted at http://clublet.com/c/c/why?HomePage . It has a very nice and intuitive way of showing topic revisions.

• There is a yellow bar showing where things changed since the last revision.
• There are buttons like on a VCR that allow you to move forward, back, all the way forward and all the way back.

Food for thought.

-- PeterThoeny - 26 Apr 2001

Another nice way is the DevWiki way: recent text is bright yellow, old text fade away in grey: see an exemple

-- ColasNahaboo - 27 Apr 2001

I like the yellow bar used in Why. The vertical bar is a commonly used indication of change in "professional" settings. (Usually black, but yellow looks good.) The buttons are fine, but seem to be more appropriate in a context where the user can revert to an older version. (I'm trying to say (1) I also like TWiki's approach, where you can see a (possibly long) single display showing all the changes in reverse chronological order, and (2) the buttons will be more useful when the user can actually revert the page to a previous version, something that I might like to allow, but might restrict to the edit page.)

I don't like the fading gray approach -- for older users (not me or people with bad eyesight that will create problems.

While we're brainstorming, I also like what I call "Word style" revision marks -- deleted text is shown crossed out and added text is shown in underline or boldface type. (This is used in conjunction with the vertical bar. I think I like the idea of the vertical bar on the view page showing the location of a revision but keep the detailed revision marks on the diff page (or even a new additional diff page -- keep the existing diff page but add one that shows the last revision with Word style revision marks.)

I see one problem with using the vertical revision bar: I subscribe to the WebNotify mailing lists. People making revisions and people looking for revisions may tend to rely on the revision bars to show where a revision occurs. If more than one revision occurs between email notifications, it will be easy to miss revisions (assuming only the latest revision is marked with a revision bar).

Possible solutions include:

• Email notification after each revision, possibly with the (diff of the) revision included. (In fact, I like the idea of including the diff of each revision in any case (with or without any other changes to the diff / revision mark / notification policy) -- you would have a better idea of whether you wanted to view the page to fully understand the change -- in many cases you might recognize immediately that the change is not interesting to you.)

• Daily email notification including the revision number of the first change -- if you visit the page and see a higher revision number you know that there has been more than one change and you need to look for older changes in the diffs.

• Show bars on all the recent revisions, keep the revision marks (bars) visible for a full day after each change. (There is still the potential to miss changes if you skip a day in reviewing changes, but then maybe the onus should be on the reader to check the diffs.)

• Other?

-- RandyKramer - 28 Apr 2001