FW: Re: Versioning, responses to comments on our document

-----Original Message-----
From: John Stracke [mailto:francis@netscape.com]
Sent: Monday, June 01, 1998 11:33 AM
To: w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
Subject: [Spam?] Re: Versioning, responses to comments on our document


David G. Durand wrote:

> The point is that version information is a relation, but that it is
> orthogonal to other dimensions.

I agree.  I was thinking about it this weekend, and I came up some scenarios
where trying to express alternate versions in the revision graph breaks
down:

   * The French and English versions are both online, but they are
translations
     of the German version, which is not.  This may be unlikely in the case
of
     new documents (e.g., translations of a company's Web site), but not in
the
     case of older books being translated--for example, consider a site in
Canada
     that wants to publish a translation of Goethe.
   * The document was composed electronically, but the original format is
not
     going to be put on the Web site--e.g., it was written in Word, but it
will
     be published in HTML and PDF.  Again, a "A derives from B" graph will
not
     contain the original document.
   * The Arabic version derives from revision 1.5 of the English version,
but
     later revisions have not been translated (say, because they contain
     references to things which would get the document censored in some
Muslim
     countries); some time later, the site manager wants to prune his
revision
     graph, but he can't prune revision 1.5, because then the graph will not
show
     any relation between the Arabic and English versions.

These could all be handled by workarounds of some sort (permitting revision
relations for documents that don't actually exist), but I believe it would
be
cleaner to express equivalent versions as a separate equivalence relation,
rather
than forcing it into the graph.  The graph for the Goethe example would then
be a
forest of revision trees; certain revisions in each tree would then be
marked as
valid avatars of the document, and content negotiation would select the best
available avatar.

Of course, I'm not saying that each avatar must be in a separate tree--we
certainly want to be able to express is-derived-from relationships where
they
exist--but those won't always be the only relationships.

--
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|John (Francis) Stracke    |My opinions are my own.|S/MIME supported |
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Received on Monday, 1 June 1998 15:04:52 UTC