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0 pointspyre11y ago0 comments

> every published document were just named with a hash of its content.

I see too many issues with this (for example):

- I publish a news article. I publish a retraction/update to said article. Now the article has a new hash. Does the old hash give you the old version of the article, or redirect you to the new version?

- How do we define 'document?' If we define it as the complete HTML page served up to the browser, then changes to the design of the site would invalidate all previous hashes. Pointing old hashes to new hashes is work, which will not always be done (leading to the same situation we have with site redesigns breaking old URLs).

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4 comments · 3 top-level

endergen11y ago· 1 in thread

Exactly, you should still be able to have references to persistent identities. Much like the semantics of clojure which has a distinction between values and references to identities like vars/agents etc.

These URLs would be clearly marked of course.

andrewflnr11y ago

Why not just have all URLs be mutable aliases for hashes?

rictic11y ago

http://ipfs.io lets you to reference content in one of two ways. Either an immutable hash of the content or a reference to the public key that's allowed to publish / update an immutable hash of the content. Seems like a pretty good compromise.

esfandia11y ago

Why not keep the old document and let the new version (child) refer to the old one (parent)? You then "just" need a refresh feature that can retrieve newer versions of the document for you. In our P2Pedia system (I referred to it in a sibling post earlier) you can go from the parent to its children via search.

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