With my last senior project finishing up (which is really cool) it is time to propose another senior project. Here's what I'm thinking, comments are welcome (though I don't have long before this needs to be final).


SVG Difference Tool

In order for developers to work together version control is used maintain consistency. Sometimes changes result in collisions, at which time the developers themselves step in to resolve the conflict. In order to do this, the person resolving the conflict must have intimate knowledge of the file format in order to understand the intricacies of the structure and the nature of the conflict. As a result, the majority of version control is limited to software development and other technical disciplines.

This project would involve making a difference tool for the SVG file format. This tool would be usable as a difference tool for popular version control systems such as CVS and Subversion so that they could be used in graphical work flows. The application will present the conflicts and differences in a graphical manner such that an artist could resolve the conflicts.

The difference tool created will be a cross-platform GUI application using the GTK+ toolkit and Open Source methodologies. This project requires determining structural differences in XML documents and also finding intuitive methods for displaying them to the user. Techniques must also be developed for understanding which changes in an SVG document are substantive and which are cosmedic.

posted Apr 22, 2005 | permanent link