RE: Refering to versions

It is different because the French and English versions and semantically 
equivalent. You should get the same information in the French and English 
versions. This is similar to requesting a document in MSWord or PostScript 
format. The information should be identical, they are semantically 
equivalent, even though the syntax's are radically different. However 
Version 1.2 and Version 1.3 of a document are semantically different. That 
is, generally, the reason for having different version numbers, to indicate 
semantic difference.
			Yaron
PS Yes, I know, you can also use versions to indicate syntactic difference 
but that is picking nits.

-----Original Message-----
From:	Dale Gass [SMTP:dale@ra.isisnet.com]
Sent:	Tuesday, October 29, 1996 2:28 AM
To:	Yaron Goland
Cc:	dale@ra.isisnet.com; w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
Subject:	Re: Refering to versions

> I think the argument is more fundamental. The feeling is that URLs point 
to
> a single resource. While a resource may have several representations each 
> representation is a semantically equivalent, although possibly degraded, 
> version of each other. Two different versions of a document are not
> semantically equivalent. While one could make an argument along the lines 
> of "degraded" content, I don't think the argument is very compelling. So 
> Henrik and others are arguing that we should specify version as part of 
the
> URL because we are referring to related but distinct resources.

But don't the Accept-*: headers allow selecting variants of a specific
URL?  I would argue that "Give me the French version" is not a request
unlike saying "Give me the Feb 14th version" or "Give me version 1.3"...

After all, a historical variant would (typically) be indicating what the
URL *once* pointed to...

-dale

Received on Tuesday, 29 October 1996 14:54:11 UTC