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The <ins> and <del> tags have always seemed weird to me in that they talk about the document's history, rather than the document itself, or what the document is

by AndrewO 17y ago

The <ins> and <del> tags have always seemed weird to me in that they talk about the document's history, rather than the document itself, or what the document is talking about. The problem I've always seen with using them for version control is, what happens when the document you're trying to version control has <ins> and <del> tags? I suppose you'd have the same problem if you put a diff under version control, but it seems like this kind of thing implies that there should be something different about those tags (I'd say another namespace, but those have been abused enough already). I don't know how/if I'd solve this, I'm just wondering if anyone else feels the same.

olavk 17y ago
They are not supposed to be used for versioning HTML documents. For example they cannot indicate if you change the HTML head or if you change markup. What they can indicate, is changes in content. I don't think you should necessarily store versioning history of content with INS and DEL tags. If you have a CMS you might have each historic version of content. If the user requests a diff, you can generate it automatically by comparing versions, but you can represent that diff for the user by using INS and DEL elements.
- omouse 17y ago
  It's beautiful that this is the one spot where the W3C got the content/presentation separation correctly. * but you can represent that diff for the user by using INS and DEL elements.* This would be false. No thank you. The whole point of including the datetime attribute is to allow for storing the versions in the document itself. HTML should never be hand-coded and should only be interacted with via a good editor. However, there aren't too many of those around. The default web browser behaviour for dealing with the INS and DEL elements is incorrect and the cause of it is a lack of understanding of what those elements are for and why they were included in the spec.

by AndrewO 17y ago

olavk 17y ago

They are not supposed to be used for versioning HTML documents. For example they cannot indicate if you change the HTML head or if you change markup. What they can indicate, is changes in content. I don't think you should necessarily store versioning history of content with INS and DEL tags. If you have a CMS you might have each historic version of content. If the user requests a diff, you can generate it automatically by comparing versions, but you can represent that diff for the user by using INS and DEL elements.

omouse 17y ago
It's beautiful that this is the one spot where the W3C got the content/presentation separation correctly. * but you can represent that diff for the user by using INS and DEL elements.* This would be false. No thank you. The whole point of including the datetime attribute is to allow for storing the versions in the document itself. HTML should never be hand-coded and should only be interacted with via a good editor. However, there aren't too many of those around. The default web browser behaviour for dealing with the INS and DEL elements is incorrect and the cause of it is a lack of understanding of what those elements are for and why they were included in the spec.