From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Sat May 18 2002 - 14:47:41 EDT
This is even more of a sociology question than the last one.
What organizational function(s) do revision marks serve?
Off the cuff, I can think of at least four use cases:
1. revisions are suggestions
-----------------------------
Most savvy authors circulate drafts of their work for feedback. It's handy
if those suggestions come back in a form which can be easily tracked until
they're either rejected or integrated into subsequent drafts.
In this scenario, the intent is that suggested revisions by anyone other
than the author all disappear -- either into the work, or out of it (at the
author's or editor's discretion).
2. revisions are about legal games
-----------------------------------
IANAL, but I can easily imagine two teams of competitive lawyers swapping
contract versions back and forth. Ditto for lobbyists and legislation. If
you're worried about the other side slipping a fast one by you, it behooves
you to play close attention to all changes -- both additions AND deletions
-- since the last version you understood.
Still, once you understand and accept a certain mix of clauses, all
revisions prior to that probably cease to be of interest. Like use case #1,
the intent is all revisions eventually disappear as such.
3. revisions are about credit
------------------------------
One of the earliest heavy uses of SGML/XML for text is the Text Encoding
Initiative (TEI), which attempts to satisy the needs of literary critics
long after the original author(s) and collaborator(s) are dead. That
community has found that maintaining an efficient persistent encoding of
*all* textual variants of a given work gets really messy really fast.
In this case, you conceivably want to know way too much about the entire
life history of a given document. For example, you might even want to know
stuff like:
- chapter two got drafted the week after the author got married
- a subplot about chickens disappeared after Z's 15th complaint
I don't know if anyone tries to worry about this for new documents as
they're created, though.
4. revisions are about blame
-----------------------------
As a variant on #2, an organization who uses standard boilerplate legal
language -- a bank, say -- may want to leave revision marks on so they can
backtrack later and fire the idiot who added the loophole in paragraph 72,
subsection d. Or, they may want to go after everyone who subsequently
reviewed that idiot's work and let it slip by.
Here again, the goal of revisions is to keep them all around, and perhaps as
invisibly as possible.
bottom line
-----------
I don't claim that the above enumeration is exhaustive, nor that we should
necessarily support all of them. Yet until we know which use cases we do
(and don't) intend to support, it's hard to assess the merits of a given
design.
Paul
motto -- the mark of good design: you can't see the hard work behind it
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat May 18 2002 - 14:50:10 EDT