Versioning

Versioning is the ability to create and manage different versions of the same document. This feature is especially important for technical documents or programmer's source code, but could also be used to present a fiction.

Haan has written of the technical challenge versioning presents (70-71). The following questions arise:

• What constitutes a different version? Should making simple changes (such as spelling) to a node result in a new version being saved?
• How should links to different versions be tracked? Should one be allowed to delete a link if it connects to an old version of a node but not the current version?
• How should the added complexity be managed internally?
• How can the versions be presented to the reader in a meaningful fashion?

Particular applications require very complete version control. In discussing the Bible, DeRose has written:

[T]he manuscripts that bear witness to an ancient text are not all copies of an original. Rather, parent manuscripts were copied some number of times, and then some or all of the copies were copied, and so on. Thus we have a tree, not a list, of document versions, with many intermediate versions missing. Storing this kind of version structure is difficult, as is making it available to the user in a comprehensible fashion. (187)

For scholarly work, the problem of presenting the Bible is further complicated by the necessity of displaying passages in several languages concurrently.