RE: variants and configurations

It seems to me that you are using the terms version, variant and configuration in some strange ways.

e.g.
>Accessing multiple variants -- for an individual object, isn't that
>done just by accessing the appropriate member of a container?  That
>is, if /foo/bar names the containers holding all versions of document
>bar, then /foo/bar/13 might be version 13.

Here you are confusing version with variant.

I think when you talk of configurations (at least from what has been said in this email) you are actually talking about a logical group of variants (e.g. A Word Document (source), its HTML and PDF renditions) which are all semantically equivalent. As far as I can tell this is what we refer to as the variants of a resource we just don't yet have a name for the group as a whole.

Does anyone disagree?

I find the concept quite interesting especially with respect to publication.

Cheers
Dylan