At Hypertext '96, a panel on versioning and hypertext systems was held under the following rubric
A Document that is in active use is generally one that is changing. Version control provides one way to control the disruptive effects of change without the worse solution of preventing or obstructing it. This panel will examine the relevance and problems of version control, with an emphasis on the topic of collaboration support. Despite its long history in the hypertext community (usually as something to be added in the future), the topics of shared editing and revision control remain complex, controversial and frequently misunderstood. However, hypertext's recent emergence into the publishing mainstream, driven by the World Wide Web, has created worldwide exposure to the issues of large scale documents and updates. Now that a really large public hypertext has come into existence, the issues of long-term maintenance and referential integrity are now now coming to the fore. The panel will give an overview of the fundamental issues, as well as a selection of arguments for and against different approaches to the issues. It builds on the perspective the presenters have gained from their own research, as well as by holding workshops on Hypertext and version control at ECHT '94 and ECSCW '95.
The organizers were particularly pleased that the panel was scheduled to follow Anja Haake's and David Hick's newest paper on versioning VerSE: Towards Hypertext Versioning Styles. This gave versioning a whole session of the conference, and allowed people to get a good view of one approach to the problems discussed generally in the panel.
You may also be interested in reading the original proposal for the panel.
The Panel itself was organized around a series of contentious issues, with individuals chosen to represent differing apporaches to addressing those issues. Participants presetned their positions in the strongest possible terms, to highlight the points of conflict. Only briefly addressed, in the introduction to the presentations were the substantial points of agreement among the panelists that versioning has a place in hypertext systems development for several reasons:
The five questions that were chosen for discussion by the panelists were:
Audience participation was quite good, though as the the 6:00 dinner hour approached, discussion did taper off. The audience, as indicated by their comments, tended to divide into two groups -- practicioners managing large web sites, and researchers interested in collaboration via shared hypertext. This confirmed the Panelists a priori suspicions about differing missions for the integration of versioning in hypertext systems.
The Web site managers want the best practical, near-term solution to what is essentially a colloborative publication problem. These participants were quite vocal and probably a majority of the audience. They were very sympathetic to the proposal that current document and software management tools should be integrated into the WWW quickly to help them manage a complex and multiply constrained publication process.
There was also a more academic or experimental group in the audience that is interested in versioning as aresearch. This group was more quiet, and seemed more interested in seeing what approaches are being tried by different research groups. Questions that we have attributed to this group tended to be about the details of a model presented by one of the panelists.
The most encouraging thing about the versioning panel from a researcher's perspective (and all the panelists shared that perspective to somne degree), was that there is real interest in seeing this functionality from real users. The most disppointing thing was that this interest seemed to stop at bringing document management for the Web up to the standard used for print production; there seemed relatively little interest in more speculative research on the role of versioning in supporting collaboration and annotation.
The slides from those panelists who presented their talks from HTML documents are available on the web.