Re: What is a Version?

On Fri, Mar 13, 2026 at 03:59:35PM +1100, Mark Nottingham wrote:
> 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.

This is good advice.

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

There is a chance that the link relation name might be generically
useful, and the I-D in this thread is not specifically about Braid -I
think- so maybe that's what is needed.  Anyways, using a specific name
is not likely to cause too much trouble if it turns out that a generic
name could have been used.

> 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".

+1

Received on Friday, 13 March 2026 05:29:06 UTC