RE: [xri] TAG discussion of versioning in URIs

["Drummond Reed" <drummond.reed@onename.com>]

Gabe,

1) When I read through it I noticed that the second link you provide
below is not a message from Tim Berners-Lee but Tim Bray.

2) If you scroll back to the original message to which the TAG was
responding, it is a long message in which Ossi Nykänen of Finland is
trying to explain how very useful it would be if the W3C provided some
form of standard for version metadata. He says: 

"In other words, the point that I'm trying to make is that if we all use
our _own_ ways to give references to our metadata (that's what we're
doing today), we face great difficulties in practise. You use
"Up-to-date:", I use "Version-controlled-resource:", Zaphney uses
element <meta> in the content, etc. If there was a clear, W3C-endorsed
recommendation about which policy to follow, making SW/WS applications
would simplify a great deal (a uniform reference to "all" metadata
declared by a resource, i.e., a single access point where to look
metadata from)."

That's a great summary of my key point about why basic version syntax
should be part of the core XRI syntax spec. We don't have to specify all
the versioning syntaxes in the world - those can be extensions - but we
need to supply the basic syntax and the ability to extend it.

3) One more key point about version metadata in XRI's: there may be an
infinite amount of potential metadata about a resource, but to my
knowledge only one class of metadata (besides the raw identifiers
themselves, as they can be considered metadata) is essential to actually
identifying the resource in question, and that's version metadata.

In other words, if you want to point to an object but there are multiple
versions of the object and you don't have a way to identify which
version is the target, then you actually can't identify it.

=Drummond 


-----Original Message-----
From: Wachob, Gabe [mailto:gwachob@visa.com]
Sent: Monday, April 21, 2003 6:14 PM
To: 'xri@lists.oasis-open.org'
Subject: [xri] TAG discussion of versioning in URIs

TAG has accepted for discussion the issue whether metadata should be
part of URIs. They include versioning as a type of metadata.

As far as I can tell, the TAG believes that versioning (along with other
metadata) should NOT be part of URIs.

See the issue summary here:

http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/ilist#metadataInURI-31

And read Tim Berner-Lee's comments here:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2002Nov/0187.html

I'm not sure there's been a lot of discussion (relative to a lot of
other topics) about versioning, but there seems to be a consensus among
those on the TAG that versioning of URIs is a nonstarter. I'm not sure
that they've really explained the issue with versioning besides to say
"its complicated". I happen to agree that the interpretation of versions
can be complicated, but I am not sure if we are going to deal with that
complication here or whether it becomes an application issue (for
applications using versioned XRIs).

        -Gabe