Keeping multiple versions of the same electronic artifact is a necessity in
many authoring fields, and a serious advantage in all of them. Hypermedia
adds to that the issue of relationship management. This poses a few additio
nal problems, especially conceptual ones, but it also provides a reliable a
nd safe solution for the well-known problem of the referential integrity of
links. The field of hypermedia has dealt with versioning issues for a long
time, since Xanadu considered it a fundamental mechanism for its inner wor
kings. Newer systems, and an important protocol for the WWW, WebDAV, consti
tute modern approaches to the problem.