Leaf documents, Mutable documents (was: Web trends)

Tim Berners-Lee (timbl@www3.cern.ch)
Wed, 15 Sep 93 10:56:14 +0200

***** Should webs have many "leaf" documents?

I se nothing wrong with such I feel the urge to put cross-references in to reduce
duplication, and help people find things and look at it in their
own way. I feel it makes my documents more valuable.
This is my style. And my time taken to make the links.

This does NOT mean that databases with a pure hierarchy
and no cross-links are "bad". Not at all.
Most documents I image and will be for a long
time non-hypertext and the web is very useful as
a place to put and find them. They are
not second-class citizens. (Not necessarily
anyway!)

***** Should documents be different of circumstances?

My view is as follows. When a document header in HTTP
specifies the URL/N (URI) of a document, then it does it
in one of two ways:
Live-URI:

which means that it does NOT guarantee that the document
will be the same, nd

Version-URI:

which DOES. When you are quoted a URI then you don't know
which sort you have untill you have retrieved it and got the
headers.

This is my answer also to Larry's point about mutable objects.

Tim