- From: <hallam@ai.mit.edu>
- Date: Mon, 28 Oct 96 13:25:11 -0500
- To: gjw@wnetc.com, w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
- Cc: hallam@ai.mit.edu
>Since HTTP/1.1 allows GET with a body, why not use something like >GET <URI> HTTP/1.1 >[...] >Document-Author: <ID> >Want-Source: yes >Authors-Credentials: <whatever> >Version-Number: 4 >[...] Because it completely destroys the idea of being able to link to an arbitrary document from an arbitrary HTML page using a single URI. Schemes such as this require all the clients to be rewritten and promote the obsolete hypertext model the Web replaced. The key advance of the web was to do away with the need for special editors, convoluted document repositories etc. If information is an accessor for a document it bellongs in the URI, otherwise it does not. The most that could be done with URIs at a lexical level would be to provide an assertion that the URI conformed to a lexical convention concerning version numbers. If we are going to support collaborative authoring it better support divergent versions and at least a hierarchical organisation of the version resources. Another point, we need to consider the definition of "set" objects, analogous to the old CMS classes and Groups. a CMS group was a collection of resource entities. A Class was a collection of particular variants of a resource. To make a release one would create a class with the versions of the resources used to make that release. the groups were used simply to collect resources together into handy units. We should be prepared to think beyond "files" however. As anyone who has coded LISP will know files are not a usefull grouping for program objects. Indeed there is no single such grouping. Phill
Received on Monday, 28 October 1996 13:19:09 UTC