The Impossible Task of Comparing CALS Tables
Robin La Fontaine, John Francis · Balisage series on markup technologies · 2022
Finding out what has changed in a CALS table is remarkably complicated. Some variant of the CALS standard is often used to represent tabular data in XML, but it permits considerable flexibility in the form of headers, footers, and spans. Additional complexity arises when authors use empty columns for layout or use column or row spans specified in unusual ways, or when applications simply do not follow the standard. In practice, comparing CALS tables directly is impossible. But maybe that is OK if all we need is a clear representation of the changes. And if we can represent them in a CALS table!