version

<entry-title>version</entry-title>

Per the microformats process, this is a page for researching and brainstorming a rel value for linking to a previous version of a page.

use case

To be able to discover previous versions of a document automatically from a document.

examples

• W3C. Nearly every W3C specification has a link in the header to the "Previous Version".
• ...

formats

revision control systems

Revision control systems (RCS) like:

• CVS
• SVN
• mercurial (hg)
• git

All have ways of representing previous versions of a document.

brainstorming

Several rel values are being considered for linking from a document to a previous version of that document.

• rel=older
  • -1 Tantek: "older" feels wrong as a noun.
• rel=version
  • +1 Tantek : this feels like the most human-author-friendly term of these.
• rel=revision
  • Mediawiki uses the term "revision" in the UI when you're viewing a previous version of a page.
  • "revision" has a developer feel to it, common terminology in revision control systems (naturally) like git etc.
• ...

related brainstorming

A related use case is to be able to find the current version of document when looking at an older version. For this, the following rel values are being considered:

• rel=current
  • seems like a link to something that is always current, not that it happens to be current right now. - Tantek
• rel=latest
  • might mean a specific link to the latest version, though W3C specs use the phrase "Latest Version" to label the link to the always current URL - Tantek
• ...

related work

You can already use:

• rel-canonical to link to the canonical version of a page. But this doesn't mean it's a different version, if anything, it may be the exact same content just at a shorter or more reliable/official URL.

see also

• existing-rel-values
• rel-canonical