XFL diff tool

[deadmoose]

I've spitballed it before, but haven't broken down to write it. Repeatedly saving the same XFL from flash will give differently ordered content in its XML. Eyeballing it, most can be "easily" sanitized, at which point you're left with the ability to actually diff two revisions of a file and maybe actually see what changed.

[horacio]

I'd love to help with this. Do you know of any reasonable good resource about the XFL specification? All I could find was old blog posts and rage.

[deadmoose]

Stale blog posts and rage sounds about right. IIRC, I never really found anything more useful than that. I've got a few of those of my own knocking around my head I've never gotten around to typing up.

That said, like I wrote...oh, god...two years ago, the XML appears to be fairly straightforward if you dig into it. I'm pulling from memory right now, but I think there were a handful of elements that were the worst offenders and yet easily identifiable/understandable, so even without knowing the rest of the format, you could slurp things in, find and modify those, and dump it back out.

What are they? Good question...been too long to remember. If you're really interested in this world of pain, I'd start by making a handful of simple example files and getting a feel for what's going on. Bonus points if you keep things nicely organized to start building up test cases to throw at this pipedream of a tool. 😄

[horacio]

Thanks a lot for your thorough answer, man. :-) And sorry I came back to reply three days after (been a crazy week). I'll start as you said right now, and see what happens.