This section is from the "Version Control with Subversion" book, by Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian W. Fitzpatrick and C. Michael Pilato. Also available from Amazon: Version Control with Subversion.
One of the most useful benefits of an Apache/WebDAV
configuration for your Subversion repository is that the
youngest revisions of your versioned files and directories
are immediately available for viewing via a regular web
browser. Since Subversion uses URLs to identify versioned
resources, those URLs used for HTTP-based repository access
can be typed directly into a Web browser. Your browser will
issue an HTTP GET
request for that URL, and
based on whether that URL represents a versioned directory
or file, mod_dav_svn will respond with a directory listing
or with file contents.
Since the URLs do not contain any information about which version of the resource you wish to see, mod_dav_svn will always answer with the youngest version. This functionality has the wonderful side-effect that you can pass around Subversion URLs to your peers as references to documents, and those URLs will always point at the latest manifestation of that document. Of course, you can even use the URLs as hyperlinks from other web sites, too.