In RESTBase we'd like to avoid storing template updates if none of the content actually changed. I started to look into using simple string equality to avoid storing a template update, but noticed that basically every re-render differs from the previous render in its about attribute values and citation links. It seems that about id assignment changes depending on async execution order. Even if there was an actual change in page rendering, these random about attributes makes the RESTBase compression ratios significantly worse than they could be.
So, my request are:
- make sure that two subsequent parses using the same input data (article, templates etc) always result in the same HTML string
- minimize the differences introduced by re-renders with different templates; for example, it would be great to keep id & about attribute changes as local as possible (don't re-number all following ids if one element was added); see also T87556.