Whitespace collapsing in TSX

[mmueller2012]

Separately on .tsx files, if you add a parent div which causes indentation changes inside the jsx, the diff will detect the added spaces as changes. It isn't something that major but would be nice to have it filtered out especially on bigger files.

Originally posted by @gustavoferrara in https://github.com/Sysmagine/SemanticDiff/issues/31#issuecomment-1664770730

[mmueller2012]

@gustavoferrara: I split this into a separate issue.

Adding or removing whitespace around HTML tags can make a visual difference, but it is very difficult to determine if this is the case. Not only is the whitespace collapsing algorithm quite complex, but its behavior changes based on various CSS attributes (display, white-space, white-space-collapse, white-space-trim, text direction, etc.). This can only be correctly determined at runtime.

In order not to hide any visual changes, we decided to show all whitespace differences for now. I am not really happy with this solution either. It is also the main reason why we don't have HTML support yet.

Which solution do you prefer?

• Simply ignoring all leading and trailing whitespace changes around tags (wrong, but most "clean" diff)
• Have a very basic collapsing algorithm that ignores CSS (better, but might still highlight irrelevant whitespace)

[gustavoferrara]

Initially i would think ignoring all whitespaces around tags would be best for me. Ideally you could let each user decide what behavior they prefer via a setting in vscode until you guys can come up with a more permanent solution.

[mmueller2012]

@gustavoferrara We have just released SemanticDiff 0.9.0 with improved JSX/TSX whitespace handling. See the release announcement for more information.

Does this solve the issue for you?