Re: has anyone thought about Memento in the context of webarch?

Herbert Van de Sompel gave me the following useful pointers regarding
Memento ("time travel for the Web"):

    For those interested in reviewing the proposal at this moment
    in time, and willing to invest 20 minutes in doing so, I think a
    combination of http://www.mementoweb.org/guide/quick-intro/  and
    http://www.mementoweb.org/guide/http/ should provide enough material.

The idea is that for a given resource R there can be a "timegate"
resource Q having the property that a representation Z is a current
representation of Q if and only if it at some time t (past or present)
Z was/is a representation of R. You use Accept-datetime: on a GET Q
request to ask for a past representation of R.

In the language of HTTPbis, all the representations of Q are the "same
information" [1] when they come from GET Q even when they're not the
"same information" when they come from GET R.

(This is only a teaser. Do not critique the protocol based on this
possibly mangled description. Look at the pages cited above.)

This relates to our ISSUE-53 (generic resources) and ACTION-231.

Jonathan

[1]  http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-p3-payload-09#section-4

Received on Friday, 9 July 2010 19:22:00 UTC