Home » Technology » Software Re-engineering » Lessons Learned -- Version control

Lessons Learned -- Version control

© Faisal Bin Bashir

In terms of version control, Web documents are very much at the update-in-place stage. In software engineering, such an approach has well-known limitations, requiring support for multiple consistent versions of systems.

It is not clear what sort of version control is needed for Web documents. In some cases-such as when Web pages contain current prices-it would be best to present the latest version. In other cases, it may be appropriate to present a set of versions from which the user could choose. In some cases it could be useful-at least, from a consumer's perspective-to show the original version while pointing out the availability of later ones.

A number of groups have recently addressed Web versioning, including the problems of providing version support for Web pages, markup languages for versioned documents, and the immaturity of Web technology in relation to document maintenance and version management.

References

"Hypertext: The Next Maintenance Mountain" by Pearl Brereton, David Budgen and Geoff Hamilton

The copyright of the article Lessons Learned -- Version control in Software Re-engineering is owned by . Permission to republish Lessons Learned -- Version control in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.