Re: All of the WWW Available **Forever**

[____Textpert Alert____ <ianf@xxxxxxxxx>]

Writes Edward Cherlin

>   Oh, OK.  Does XML provide for referring to older versions of a
>   text that the publisher has replaced? That was the point of my
>   proposal, now that there is someone archiving the whole Web, with
>   a plan to continue at regular intervals. 

  I haven't studied the drafts in depth yet, mainly because they
  are so heavy in jargon, but one of the proposed 'Xptr' provisions
  is a _backward-compatible_ ability to add arbitrary arguments
  to the URI string, in this fashin:

scheme://server[:port]/path/doc.suffix|arbitrary-argument-string

  which would then be evaluated by the back end accordingly to
  principles and rules of how such address fragments be decoded. 


  That means, I guess, that (an imaginary) URL of

scheme://server[:port]/path/doc.suffix|date;version;whatever

                                      ^[observe the delimiter]

  could deliver the closest-date and/or the precise version of the
  requested document from suitably enhanced bac end.  In a way, it's
  not that unlike the current 'value-added' command/ argument
  default mechanism of the HTTP to indicate search argument string
  of a URL, only here used to include commands in that string:

scheme://server[:port]/path/doc.suffix?a+b/format-2/

  (an example of which can be seen at www.minds.com )


__Ian