VTML for Fine-Grained Change Tracking in Editing Structured Documents

The task of creating documents collaboratively is complex and it requires sophisticated tools. Structured documents provide a semiorganised writing environment where collaboration may assume more controlled forms than with other document types. CoEd is a writing environment that provides integrated structure support, content overview and version management for complex and hierarchical documents (e.g. technical documentation). The present implementation has, however, limitations in the efficient management of disk usage and in providing more sophisticated collaboration functionality. This led us to consider the VTML change tracking language as a backend for improving the performance and feature set of CoEd. This paper explores the advantages of using a sophisticated changetracking language in a versioning system for collaborative writing.