Item2067: Improve diff on raw wiki text

When examining the history of a page, I prefer looking at the Wiki source text, not the rendered HTML, as some differences are subtle or not visible at all, especially when HTML is entered directly to achieve features not easily supported by Wiki syntax.

Currently, the debug renderer of the rdiff script does provide some support for this. Its markup, however, is less than optimal, for a number of reasons:

• No (obvious) support for side-by-side diff.
• No CSS classes for type lines, so formatting or even hiding them is very hackish.
• No foswikiDiffChangedText CSS class for the left hand side of a changed hunk, making corresponding CSS rules cumbersome. E.g. trunk currently has no color for these.
• Common lines get repeated unnecessarily.
• Text doesn't have <br /> tags, making it difficult to both keep original line breaks and still wrap particularly long lines. Item1951 seems to deal with this aspect in more detail.

I would prefer for the normal diff modes (sequential and sidebyside and the proposed word-based mode) to all support operating on raw text instead of rendered text. To achieve this, an additional "raw" attribute would make sense, with values "off", "on" and "debug", corresponding the the options for view. A corresponding dropdown in the topic actions should be added.

Then the renderer=debug could do whatever it pleases, as it would be for debugging only, and most normal users most likely wouldn't use it to identify changes.

I don't know if the renderer=raw is supposed to do anything like what I described. For me it seems to do nothing at all, i.e. its output lists revisions but they appear only as empty blocks.

-- MartinVonGagern - 14 Sep 2009