Readable and understandable diffs is not a property of text files. It is very easy to design tools and formats that use text files, yet do not give you diffs th

Readable and understandable diffs is not a property of text files. It is very easy to design tools and formats that use text files, yet do not give you diffs that are readable or understandable. Readability and understandability depend on more strict requirements that a text file format may or may not have. Many do, but far from all do. For instance, JSON files do not have requirements on the ordering of keys. When making a small change to a JSON file, it is entirely legal to reorder every single key, completely destroying the diff, and an automatic tool may very well do this. And as a counter-example, we could easily use a binary representation of JSON data, but use a diffing tool that normalises key ordering to provide diffs that are more readable and understandable than a text diff of a JSON file, even without malicious reordering of lines.