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OOXML is typically stored as a compressed ZIP archive. Even when its decompressed to its constituent XML files, modifications are performed without much regard to how a diff will look.

This applies to auto-generated XML in general -- ODT is not immune. LaTeX and reStructuredText are the only formats I know of which are suitable for professional publication and can be usefully diffed.

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That's very interesting. Why is auto-generated XML hard to diff?

Consider an XML file consisting of one long line of text. A diff would not be very useful in that case.

I guess an XML aware diff could work though? certainly not at all line based...

If it did node-based diffs.

Most diffs do that. The Diff that ships with gvim on Windows has this option on by default and I couldn't find where to turn it off because it was severely screwing up what I was diffing.

That's because XML does not guarantee order of elements.

"That's because XML does not guarantee order of elements."

It better, or else it's broken. In XML, element order matters. Attribute order does not.

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