Strawman proposal for DIFF

The versioning design team considered diffs briefly today, and decided
that:

  1. they're orthogonal to versioning because:
       1. we can version without them (regardless of whether the server
          uses them internally)
       2. they're potentially useful for non-versioning systems
       3. once you can get a diff on any two resources, since each
          revision of a resource is itself a resource, then you can just
          use that diff operation on revision resources)
  2. if anybody does them, the mechanism must be extensible, to support
     arbitrary content-types and arbitrary diff formats
  3. versioning is hard enough without adding this extra work.

That being said, I considered it an interesting exercise to sketch out a
framework for doing them.  I've done a very rough strawman proposal
(just something I banged out in semi-idle time during the meeting), and
it's at <http://people.netscape.com/francis/webdav/diffs.html>.  It's
very sketchy, but I think it gets the idea across.  Does anybody think
this is something to pursue?

--
/====================================================================\
|John (Francis) Stracke    |My opinions are my own.|S/MIME supported |
|Software Retrophrenologist|=========================================|
|Netscape Comm. Corp.      | Don't anthropomorphize computers.       |
|francis@netscape.com      |   They don't like it.                   |
\====================================================================/
New area code for work number: 650

Received on Monday, 10 August 1998 21:54:51 UTC