On Mar 11, 2014, at 10:10 AM, t.p. <daedulus(_at_)btconnect(_dot_)com> wrote:
Utilities exist that compare old and new text and highlight the changes,
and are quite smart about resynchronising old and new where the changes
are substantial.
Are you aware of any that would work on xml2rfc documents?
BBEdit works well for me. Syntax coloring and XML checking combined with a very
nice side-by-side comparison-merge capability. I have no doubt there are
comparable tools on Windows.
But more generally, this entire discussion strikes me as a bit precious.
Speaking as someone who has assumed the editorship of any number of drafts over
the years, including several done in fairly obscure markup languages (bare
nroff, nroff with custom macros, Andrew markup, etc.), mechanical editing
issues are completely dwarfed by the difficulty of working with someone else's
technical English, irrespective of how well written (or not) it is. Doing this
well is not easy, especially when there are politics in play, which is almost
always the case.
And if all you're doing is suggesting a few changes, then just suggest them.
IMO the point at which you need to work with the document source pretty
much coincides with becoming an editor, with all that implies.
Ned