- From: Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@gmail.com>
- Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2009 08:35:17 +0000
- To: Robin Berjon <robin@berjon.com>
- Cc: marcosc@opera.com, Thomas Landspurg <thomas.landspurg@gmail.com>, SUZANNE Benoit RD-SIRP-ISS <benoit.suzanne@orange-ftgroup.com>, public-webapps@w3.org
2009/3/17 Robin Berjon <robin@berjon.com>: > On Mar 17, 2009, at 13:24 , Marcos Caceres wrote: >> >> Agreed. Thinking forward, how do you recommend we identify version 2.0 >> of the widget configuration file format (or should we just cross that >> bridge when we get to it?) ? > > Personally, I would recommend that we don't :) Version identifiers are > largely useless and experience shows that users use them wrong (e.g. a bunch > of SVG out there that's labelled as 1.1 is really 1.2, but people just > copy-paste the root element). > > There are strategies to implement versioning of XML vocabularies which don't > require having a version identifier. These are generally based on an > "ignore" approach whereby elements and attributes that the processor doesn't > know about are silently skipped. That means we can add new features in the > next revision and it won't break older UAs. If at some point we make > breaking changes, then we just change the namespace. > > Note that this needs to be defined in v1, so no, I think we have to cross > that bridge now. SVG includes this strategy: > > http://www.w3.org/TR/SVGMobile12/implnote.html#UnsupportedProps > > It is worth pointing out that porting the same strategy to the configuration > document would be simpler. Are you sure changing the namespace is preferable to a version attribute? Seems very drastic, and usually it's best to avoid doing it as it makes all tools that process existing markup redundant. Also, you mention most users "just copy-paste the root element" - surely you'd still have the problem if you change the namespace? At the moment, I don't think there is any establised "right way" when versioning xml, but changing the namespace is a bad idea. -- Andrew Welch http://andrewjwelch.com Kernow: http://kernowforsaxon.sf.net/
Received on Wednesday, 18 March 2009 08:35:52 UTC