Lex Iterata is a project to collect and transform the content of the Belgian Official Journal web site. It presents that content in an enhanced format for human comprehension, while also providing structured data tailored for machine consumption.
This Git repository is an experiment to generate one Markdown file (similar to what is done in iterata-md) for one example legislative text, and doing it again for all its archived versions.
Each version is recorded in a separate commit. This lets us have a better idea of what Git can offer, including using the GitHub interface to explore the different versions.
On GitHub, you can view the list of commits (and thus of each versions of the text) then click a particular commit. This shows the differences (or "diff" for short) between the previous version and the version mentioned in the commit message.
Note: sometimes GitHub shows a message "Large diffs are not rendered by default." with a link "Load diff" to force it to show the commit.
Another interesting view is what developers name "Blame". When you view a particular commit (as explained above), there is a little "..." button on the top right of the filename. When clicking that button, it shows a menu with one entry labeled "View file".
Clicking "View file" will show you the file at that particular commit (and thus, version), without trying to show the "diff" with the previous version.
Above the content of the file, there are three buttons: "Preview" (which is already selected), "Code" (which allows to see the raw Markdown code), and "Blame".
When you click "Blame", you should see two columns on the screen. Here is for instance the Blame view of the file at version 84.
On that screen, the right column shows the raw content of the file (which uses the Markdown syntax). The left column shows which commits have contributed to which parts of the file.
When exploring the history of this text on the command-line, we suggest to use a command such as:
$ git log -p --reverse --word-diff