- From: Yaron Goland <yarong@microsoft.com>
- Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 23:22:47 -0800
- To: "'Larry Masinter'" <masinter@parc.xerox.com>, "'connolly@beach.w3.org'" <connolly@beach.w3.org>
- Cc: "'ejw@rome.ics.uci.edu'" <ejw@rome.ics.uci.edu>, "'w3c-dist-auth@w3.org'" <w3c-dist-auth@w3.org>
I say we take the weasel way out and support both. The draft already allows for this. Yaron -----Original Message----- From: Larry Masinter [SMTP:masinter@parc.xerox.com] Sent: Sunday, October 27, 1996 10:48 AM To: connolly@beach.w3.org Cc: ejw@rome.ics.uci.edu; w3c-dist-auth@w3.org Subject: Re: Prelim. DAV spec. I think there's a design choice people are facing in trying to reconcile versioning and content negotiation, and I want to argue for one choice over another: Under content negotiation in HTTP, a single URL http://myhost.dom/somestuff connects to a single resource (the 'somestuff') but a resource can have multiple representations; one of those representations is chosen using content negotiation. When we add versioning, you can say that a) versions apply to resources or b) versions apply to representations and there is some temptation, for generality, to try to go down the road (b), but I want to argue that choice (a) is the choice you should make. Content negotiation ALLOWS (but does not REQUIRE) that each representation might also have its own URL, that is, a representation of one resource might be another resource (presumably with only a single representation). I think if you want to version separate representations, it should only apply in the situation where there is a separate URL for each of those separate representations. So that http://myhost.dom/somestuff might have both an english and a french representation, but if you want to talk about the VERSIONS of those representations, you should have separate URLs for the resources http://myhost.dom/somestuff.en http://myhost.dom/somestuff.fr and talk about the versions of those resources in terms of versioning. Content negotiated objects are, in fact, a kind of compound object. If you have a compound (a book consisting of separate chapters) then the versioning of the subparts is not completely independent of the versioning of the whole. Similarly, the versioning of a resource with multiple representations must of course be linked to the versioning of those representations, if the representations are allowed to be versioned independently. While we're at it, we might want to supply LINK relationships for variants in content negotiation so that we can tell when a resource being returned is to be considered just one variant, but that's probably a discussion for a different mailing list. Larry
Received on Thursday, 31 October 1996 02:22:46 UTC