Diffs: could/should we show that the content of a subresource (e.g. an image) changed?

[Mr0grog]

So this is an interesting one. If a subresource like an image keeps the same URL across versions, but its content changes, could and should we do something to highlight that?

Here’s an example: https://monitoring.envirodatagov.org/page/80781ac3-2cfe-49e6-b00e-5407d164e78c/57cc3443-f570-4373-b2b3-4e7ebef2780e..6480c3ae-8372-4368-a640-a595c0531d20: you can see that the banner image changed sizes here. That’s actually because the banner image itself changed (see the earlier one at Internet Archive), even though the URL of the <img> tag did not.

There’s no way to solve this with Versionista; we just can’t get the relevant data from it (if you click through to Versionista for that change, you’ll see it highlighted, but only because the height attribute on the <img> tag changed, not because the content of the image did—Versionista can’t do any better with its own data than we can). But with IA, we could: if, when we archived the page, we also pulled all its subresources and hashed them, we could know if the target of an <img> tag (or audio, video, iframe, etc.) was different even when the URL remained the same. (Or conversely, if the target was the same but just got moved to a different URL!) It would be a fair bit more work. Would it be useful?

[danielballan]

Sounds useful to me, but likely a post-v0.1 concern.

[stale]

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[Mr0grog]

Perfect candidate for the new, unstale-able “idea” tag :D