Suggestions on how build an HTML Diff tool?

Question

In this post I asked if there were any tools that compare the structure (not actual content) of 2 HTML pages. I ask because I receive HTML templates from our designers, and freq

Answer 1

My suggestion is just the basic way of doing it... Of course to tackle the issue you mentioned additional rules must be applied here... Which is in your case, we got a matching div element, and then apply attributes/property matching rules and what not...

To be honest, there are many and complicated rules that need to be applied for the comparison, and its not just a simple matching element to another element. For example what happens if you have duplicates. e.g. 1 div element on one side, and 2 div element on the other side. How are you gonna match up which div elements matches together?

There are alot other complicated issues that you will find in the comparison word. Im speaking based of experience (part of my job is to maitain my company text comparison engine).