Re: What is a Version?

My dim dark past in publishing technology wants a word. It thinks this
discussion may not be useful.

The word “version” appears in many different applications and technologies.
Examples occur in legislative publishing systems, TechDoc for things like
commercial airplanes, content management systems used by commercial
publishers, and source-code control systems.

In my experience, the semantics of the word “version” are not only
inconsistent across these contexts, they are often incommensurable. One of
the things that varies wildly across the landscape is the relationship
between a “version” and whatever entity the version is a version of.

Anyhow, in each of these contexts, versions (whatever they mean) are
successfully identified by URIs and thus by definition are resources. Not
just theoretically, Web interfaces to these applications  are ubiquitous
and successful. Doesn’t mean they mean the same thing by “version", just
that HTTP doesn’t get in the way.

I am highly dubious of the proposition that any “version” mechanism
anchored at the HTTP protocol level is going to be useful in an
interestingly-large subset of the contexts where the word “version” is
thrown around.

-Tim