Versioning Web Server
For a variety of web sites it would be useful if the site were able to present past states of the site.
A web server that was integrated with the file system can do a variety of tricks.
Updates to my site are most frequently:
- spelling corrections,
- grammar corrections,
- links to newly discovered sites,
- repairing broken URLs.
A server that is integrated with a file system can maintain access to older
versions via a reverse delta scheme.
Writes to old documents may be virtualized to compute the backwards delta.
The cost of maintaining all of the old versions would not be greatly larger than keeping only the current versions.
Old versions might be accessed thru new ULR syntax.
A server based on Unix or other classic operating system is unable to intervene at the critical point to capture the new file state while the old is still available, in order to compute the delta.
Some systems provide for foreign file systems.
I don’t know whether that interface suits our purpose.
Such a server can perform the http protocol.
It might also perform the ftp protocol to support remote maintenance of the site files.
The means and ends described here are both connected to those here.