Last modified: 2012-07-26 15:15:57 UTC

Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

Wikimedia migrated from Bugzilla to Phabricator. Bug reports are handled in Wikimedia Phabricator.
This static website is read-only and for historical purposes. It is not possible to log in and except for displaying bug reports and their history, links might be broken. See T15809, the corresponding Phabricator task for complete and up-to-date bug report information.
Bug 13809 - Whitespace changes should be identifiable in wiki diffs
Whitespace changes should be identifiable in wiki diffs
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Product: MediaWiki
Classification: Unclassified
History/Diffs (Other open bugs)
unspecified
All All
: Low normal with 1 vote (vote)
: ---
Assigned To: Nobody - You can work on this!
:
: 29587 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks:
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2008-04-21 15:35 UTC by Michael Hardy
Modified: 2012-07-26 15:15 UTC (History)
7 users (show)

See Also:
Web browser: ---
Mobile Platform: ---
Assignee Huggle Beta Tester: ---


Attachments

Description Michael Hardy 2008-04-21 15:35:19 UTC
Look at this edit and see if you can figure out what was done, with your naked eye and no help from computers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cognos_Reportnet&diff=207131735&oldid=207131625

I did several similar edits on the same article within a minute or so.  They were visible, if minor, improvements in the article's appearance.  If anyone wants to know what I did and looks at the "diff", they will probably be baffled.  Things like this should be made more visible.
Comment 1 Robert Leverington 2008-04-21 15:57:46 UTC
What did you change, it would be very difficult to fix without knowing what you did?
Comment 2 AlexSm 2008-04-21 20:03:28 UTC
Michael added one space (as shown by my userscript which is similar to [[User:Cacycle/wikEdDiff]] which uses its own JavaScript diff engine).

I would like to note that the diff engine has become a bit inconsistent lately: 1) see bug 13804, 2) added lines (green cell on the right, white on the left) sometimes have red font color and sometimes black as it was before. 

Comment 3 Bawolff (Brian Wolff) 2011-06-25 23:15:26 UTC
*** Bug 29587 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 4 Bawolff (Brian Wolff) 2011-06-25 23:16:47 UTC
jidanni at bug 29587 had an interesting potential solution of putting a "w" at the side of the lines that are only whitespace changes.
Comment 5 Dan Jacobson 2011-06-25 23:31:51 UTC
Or you can make it a bold "*" to save on translations. However the mouseover message still needs to be translated. Also please make sure any solution will also be equally visible/accessible in text browsers.
Comment 6 Krinkle 2011-06-25 23:54:31 UTC
Putting 'w' or '*' in the diff makes it more complicated that it is. No need for such complexity that new comers will not understand.
--

Whenever non-whitespace changes take place, MediaWiki adds a <span class="diffchange"> element around it. This class, by default, only has text color styling (red color), however it can also be given a background shade. For example, look at:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons:Sandbox&diff=55911338&withCSS=MediaWiki:Gadget-diffGreenBlue.css

The diffchange part (a full stop was inserted in the middle) has a darker background.

If MediaWiki were to output <span class="diffchange"> for whitespaces changes as well, combined with a new css rule for background-color, this bug can be solved.

The same was done in CodeReview on MediaWiki.org (bug 27375). See for example
the whitespace changes in r42730.


--
Text browsers are not supported by MediaWiki for full functionality. Basic functionality (reading articles, browsing the wiki, searching/finding pages) will work, but there is no active testing or compatibility part of the MediaWiki development cycle for them: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Compatibility#Browser
Comment 7 Nemo 2012-07-26 15:15:57 UTC
Fixed by new diffs.

Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.


Navigation
Links