Dave Orchard on versioning;

The fundamental problem with a version # in a document is that it doesn’t provide for a given document to be valid under more than one version. What we really need is to be able to indicate a “space of versions” that a given document is valid under, whether that’s a list or regexp or whatever.

Amen. You know, just like a media type!

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  1. Wouldn’t that only be applicable if you were transferring the document or had some document management system? What if the document is just stored on disk?

  2. Even on disk, a file needs a way to externally declare what kind of file it is… commonly a file extension.

  3. Yeah, but typically thats going to be .xml not .purchase-order-v1.1.xml.

  4. […] to me is how do I even communicate that some datatype is available? If I’m supposed to define my own content types, surely I need a way to communicate what the some of the possibilities are and what they represent? […]

  5. Dan – if it uses “.xml”, then it’s poorly described. Most people won’t do that anyhow, for the obvious reason that when they (double) click on the file nothing meaningful will happen – just ask the RSS folks who tried this before finally fixing the problem.

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