Re: What is a Version?

I haven't been following the discussion closely, but I will observe that people tend to register very abstract protocol artefacts and hope that they'll be reused broadly. Link relations are especially prone to this. While that approach succeeds sometimes, it's not as common as people think. 

What's much more successful is defining a link relation as part of a specific protocol -- you shouldn't specify an exact media type because this isn't media types, but behaviourally the expectations should be tight. Those link relations tend to provide more value IMO.

So here instead of something wooly like "version" why not "braid-commit"? People know what that refers to.

Likewise with the header names -- instead of trying to solve Versioning for All of HTTP, it might be more approachable and workable to say "here's a specific model of versioning and how it's mapped to HTTP", with an appropriate prefix, like "Braid-Version".

Just my .02, YMMV.



> On 13 Mar 2026, at 3:49 pm, Nico Williams <nico@cryptonector.com> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Mar 13, 2026 at 03:48:10PM +1100, Mark Nottingham wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On 13 Mar 2026, at 3:42 pm, Nico Williams <nico@cryptonector.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Content-Location:?  No, that's the location of this resource
>> 
>> Representation.
> 
> Right, still.
> 
> I think for the link to the "commit" what we'd want is
> 
>  Link: <...>; rel="version"

--
Mark Nottingham   https://www.mnot.net/

Received on Friday, 13 March 2026 04:59:44 UTC