RE: Versioning goals doc

Goals document dated 9/16/98:

Definitions:

"5. A variant is a representation of a resource. A resource
may have one or more representations associated with it at
any given time. Not all versioning DAV servers need support
variants."

This definition needs work. My understanding of variants is 
that variants are not merely mechanically generated alternate
renditions of the same document that all share the 
properties of the original rendition of the document. My
understanding of variants is that they are full status
resources, and that they have their own properties.
Furthermore, variants may exist even if versioning doesn't.
Variants are independent of versioning.
The principal use case for variants seems to be
language translations of documents.  Obviously, a
translated version of a document has its title property
translated as well as its content, etc.

In other words, variants are separate documents (resources), 
and they have nothing directly to do with versioning.

The original English document and a German variant of
it may both be versioned. It is possible that each
revision of the English document has a variant that is
a revision of the German variant. However, it is also
possible that the translator guy was busy, and so
didn't translate some of the revisions. So some
of the revisions don't have corresponding variants
in the German document.

Here is my suggested rewording:

"5. One resource is said to be a variant of another
resource when a sufficiently strong relationship exists 
between the content of the two resources, e.g., when each
resource is a language translation of the other.
In this regard, "resource" is, of course, understood to 
include the case of a resource that is a revision
of an abstract versioned resource."

Then, of course, we need goals for variants.
Otherwise, why have them at all?

"13. Given a resource, it must be possible to retrieve
all the resources that are considered to be variants of it.

14. Server support for variants is optional."

Alan Babich

Received on Tuesday, 29 September 1998 18:51:03 UTC