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

Hmm,

All of these cases must be handled by the versioning system already. It must
be able to refer to versions that are unavailable for various reasons.

The first and second examples are simply instances of version 1 that has
branched into 1a and 1b, and version 1 has been deleted. But both branches
are still available.

I guess we need to split the question into two parts that are dealt with
separately,

(a) Should the relationship between variants of a document be expressed as
parts of the version graph?

And (b) Should that knowledge be used by the server in content negotiation?

I believe that (a) is an easy yes, because the relationships are not any
different. (b) is the hard one.

Marcus.

> -----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.
> 
> --
> /====================================================================\
> |John (Francis) Stracke    |My opinions are my own.|S/MIME supported |
> |Software Retrophrenologist|=========================================|
> |Netscape Comm. Corp.      | E pui muove!                            |
> |francis@netscape.com      |  -- Galileo                             |
> \====================================================================/
> New area code for work number: 650
> 
>

Received on Monday, 1 June 1998 15:27:15 UTC