Dear all, this is the third suggestion: All PDP-related emails, web pages, and other documents by RIPE will either carry a unified diff (diff -ruN) or directly link to a page which shows said unified diff. Other formats, like full text, old/new text, etc are encouraged as well, but the diff is the binding format in which PDPs are published, documented, and discussed. Rationale: It's needlessly hard to read and compare full or partial text dumps, forcing people to do work by themselves and for themselves which a computer could do once and for all. A XML-based format that's parse-able by new tools has been proposed as an alternative. This would mean extra work while defining the XML format, to write new tools, and cut of the extensive tools and workflows around unified diffs. The point has also been raised that word diffs may be easier to read. Quoth the manpage: Nevermerge! Show words as [-removed-] and {+added+}. Makes no attempts to escape the delimiters if they appear in the input, so the output may be ambiguous. Ironically, --word-diff in git comes with an option that allows parsing, --porcelain, which turns word-based diff back into line-based diffs: Use a special line-based format intended for script consumption. Added/removed/unchanged runs are printed in the usual unified diff format, starting with a +/-/` ` character at the beginning of the line and extending to the end of the line. Newlines in the input are represented by a tilde ~ on a line of its own. Long story short: Unified diffs are called unified diffs and universally accepted for a reason. Richard