- From: David G. Durand <david@dynamicdiagrams.com>
- Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1998 19:46:08 -0700
- To: WEBDAV WG <w3c-dist-auth@w3.org>, "Babich, Alan" <ABabich@filenet.com>
>From: "Babich, Alan" <ABabich@filenet.com> >I'm also of the school of thought that it would not >be feasible to have a design based on additive diff's >for all formats, not even for all "text based" types: >I use a well known word processor that has a proprietary >format, and that WP itself can't deal with diff's >correctly in some cases. And the proprietary format of >the WP changes from release to release. None of these objections, yours or Jim's, goes to the heart of the point that I was actually (trying) to make. Additive diff processing is obviously not going to be implemented by every server -- and that's OK. However, DIFF/PATCH method allow efficient client update protocols for large documents and also for useful end-user features, and (for some servers, an some media-types) also allow the support of additive or change-set oriented versioning). Files that contain checksums can be DIFFed by a straight binary diff on octets, even if those DIFFS can't be added sensibly. That's OK. There are surely media-type specific formats that can be developed for such data types if there is value in it (and a lot of people find that there is). So the fact that you can't do everything with every kind of data is a more-or- less completely irrelevant fact. You also can't search textual content in GIFs of page-images. That may affect your choice of data formats, but it doesn't mean that you have to eliminate full-text searching, because it won't work for GIFs! I'm not proposing that WEBDAV define additive versioning for arbitrary file formats, but thgat the protocol not prevent interoperable server implementations of such capabilities. There are lots of things that make sense for a server to do for some media-types and not for others, and that's not the issue her. >One could defined an additive diff format for straight >ASCII text (and people have done that), but a design >that works for that one type and no others is not >adequate. As I said, I can define a format for intensional versioning of arbitrary binary content, and for representing changes to integrate into that representation. I'm not pushing my particular format because I'm not religious about that, and defining such a format is not rocket science, just plain old work. -- David ------------------------------------------+---------------------------- David Durand dgd@cs.bu.edu| david@dynamicDiagrams.com Boston University Computer Science | Dynamic Diagrams http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/ | http://dynamicDiagrams.com/ | MAPA: mapping for the WWW | http://dynamicDiagrams.com/minimapa
Received on Friday, 2 October 1998 19:59:47 UTC