Re: Prelim. DAV spec.

# If there are cases where variants are NOT computed on the fly, what should
# happen when someone creates a new version of the resource (by editing one of
# the variants)?  I assume the user would normally prefer for the other
# variants to be brought into synch automatically -- for new versions of them
# to be generated from the one he submitted.  Do we want to do anything to
# support this?

It depends on how the variants are computed. If they can be
automatically generated, you might want to update them automatically,
but the state of language translation software, for example, isn't
really up to automatically regenerating the French page from a new
version of the English page, for example.

Since there's not a general solution, the question is whether we need
or want to do anything in the protocol. I don't think so.

An update (POST or whatever) to http://host.dom/dir/resource.en.html
might or might not automatically affect the version of
http://host.dom/dir/resource.fr.html but it probably _does_ affect the
version of the (content-negotiated) http://host.dom/dir/resource.html
analogous to the situation that when you update chapter 1 of the book,
you automatically update the whole book.

Another way to think of a resource that has variants that are not
independently named as "multipart/alternative" content: all of the
variations are there. Think of a resource that has multiple parts as
"multpart/mixed".

Larry

Received on Thursday, 31 October 1996 16:34:41 UTC