version management and relative links
Larry Masinter (masinter@parc.xerox.com)
Sat, 8 Jun 1996 16:37:40 PDT
One of the main things that bother me about all of the proposals for
dealing with versions with non-version-aware browsers is the handling
of versioned links and embedded absolute links.
Let's say that you ask to view "version 3" of a HTML page. Do you want
the verison 3 of the GIF images that were included, too? Do you want
all of the hyperlinks to be links to version 3, or continue to be
links to the original material.
Is it possible to do this without rewriting the URLs contained within
the material? If the material uses relative links, do you want to
arrange it so that relative URLs don't have to be rewritten?
In the MHTML working group (sending HTML in MIME), there was some
design work at one time on a 'catalog' which might be included as a
wrapper to a HTML page as part of multipart/related. The 'catalog'
would consist of a set of renamings
> Interpret the following (enclosed) HTML page, but within it,
> whenever you see this URL
> "http://blah.blah.com/stuff"
> substitute the following URL instead
> "cid:012312313ab@blah.com"
I'm wondering if we might presuppose a 'catalog-aware' browser rather
than a 'version-aware' browser. A versioned resource would be
delivered as a cataloged entity so that embedded URLs that pointed to
or included versioned material could themselves be versioned.
Larry