Abstract
Collaborative work, with the need to keep HTML/XML code up-to-date, is now becoming vital particularly in the Web Development field. In order to fully support collaborative work and resolve related problems the need has arisen for an optimum solution to the automated editing of a number of parallel copies originating from a single original HTML/XML code document with the additional requirement to subsequently merge the copies into a single updated document. A number of algorithms have been used in the past for the purpose, such as: Diff3, XmlDiff, DeltaXML & 3DM, but HTML/XML code complexity related issues have now called for an algorithm that is more specifically designed for the purpose. In this paper a new algorithmic approach to merging HTML/XML code documents is presented that is based on the “Three-way Merge” approach and the “Node-per-Node” comparison between ordered trees. For the creation of the actual merging function operating at the heart of the algorithm, a particular methodology was followed in which only the two “Current Versions” are required for the generation of the updated document, and no involvement of the “Original Document” is necessary. This is an important improvement over the currently existing algorithms because eliminates the well-known “Idempotent” problem in merging two HTML/XML documents. In addition, the algorithmic approach presented here allows for the identification and treatment of all the conflicts that arise during a HTML/XML code merging in an ordered and clearly specified manner.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Khanna, S., Kunal, K., Pierce, B.C.: A formal investigation of Diff3. In: Arvind, V., Prasad, S. (eds.) Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science (FSTTCS), December 2007
IBM Alphaworks: XML Diff And Merge Tool Home Page. http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/xmldiffmerge
The “DeltaXML” Project. http://www.deltaxml.com. Accessed 29 Mar 2019
Lindholm, T.: A three-way merge for XML documents. In: Proceedings of The 2004 ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, pp. 1–10 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1145/1030397.1030399
Dinh, H.: A new approach to merging structured XML files. Int. J. Adv. Res. Comput. Eng. Technol. (IJARCET), 4(5) (2015)
Ba, M.L., Abdessalem, T., Senellart, P.: Merging uncertain multi-version XML documents, January 2013
Oliveira, A., Tessarolli, G., Ghiotto, G., Pinto, B., Campello, F., Marques, M., Oliveira, C., Rodrigues, I., Kalinowski, M., Souza, U., Murta, L., Braganholo, V.: An efficient similarity-based approach for comparing XML documents. Inf. Syst. 78, 40–57 (2018)
Document Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core Specification v1.0, W3C Recommendation. http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/Overview.html
Matthijs, N.: HTML, The Foundation of The Web. http://www.wpdfd.com/issues/86/html_the_foundation_of_the_web/
Rozinajová, V., Hluchý, O.: One approach to HTML wrappers creation: using document object model tree. In: Proceedings of CompSysTech, pp. 41–41 (2009)
Barnard, D.: Tree-to-tree correction for document trees. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/47676.html
Cobena, G.: A comparative study for XML change detection. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/696350.html
Chawathe, S.S., Rajaraman, A., Garcia-Molina, H., Widom J.: Change detection in hierarchically structured information. In: Proceedings of The 1996 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, Montreal, Canada, pp. 493–504 (1996)
Cobena G., Abiteboul, S., Marian, A.: Detecting changes in XML documents. In: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Data Engineering, San Jose, CA, pp. 41–52 (2002)
Acknowledgment
The authors would like to thank editors and anonymous reviewers for their valuable and constructive suggestions on this paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bakaoukas, A.G., Bakaoukas, N.G. (2020). A Top-Down Three-Way Merge Algorithm for HTML/XML Documents. In: Arai, K., Kapoor, S., Bhatia, R. (eds) Intelligent Computing. SAI 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1228. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52249-0_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52249-0_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-52248-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-52249-0
eBook Packages: Intelligent Technologies and RoboticsIntelligent Technologies and Robotics (R0)