Re: Media types and versioning

On 5/17/07, noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com> wrote:
> Mark Baker writes:
>
> > I think that your problem could be solved simply by minting a
> > new media type when you break backwards compatibility.
>
> I can see the advantages, but I think there are also disadvantages.  First
> of all, certain languages go through many, many revisions that are at
> least in some ways incompatible.  It's not clear to me that as a practical
> matter the media type system is administered to handle the repeated
> registrations that would follow from your suggestion,

IMO, what doesn't scale isn't the media type system, it's the
deployment of backwards-incompatible changes to existing data formats.

So my suggestion is simply "Don't do that" ... but if you must, then
mint a new media type (and when that happens, Dave's
version-in-the-type-name idea would be fine).

Mark.

Received on Friday, 18 May 2007 01:43:19 UTC